Reborn as an Adventurer: I Gain a Skill From Every Monster I Eat

Chapter 28: Chapter 28 — The Shape of a Secret

The guild library was quiet in the mid-morning hours, most adventurers still out on quests or sleeping off the previous night’s tavern business, and Arlen was grateful for the emptiness as he settled into a corner table, turning over how best to ask the question that had been sitting with him since the river.

Two abilities were no longer a strange, isolated mystery he could quietly set aside. They were a pattern, and patterns, left unexplained, invited exactly the kind of questions he couldn’t afford to answer honestly.

”Something I can help you find?” Fessel asked, glancing up from his ledger as Arlen approached the archive shelves.

”Dual-Affinity cultivators,” Arlen said. ”I’ve heard the term mentioned around the guild a few times, but only ever in passing. Wanted to actually understand it properly instead of piecing it together from tavern talk.”

”Not something rookies usually ask about.” Fessel set down his quill, mild interest replacing his earlier distraction, and gestured toward a shelf near the back of the room. ”There’s a section on it, if you want the formal texts. Curious what’s got you asking.”

”Tavern talk,” Arlen said, offering the same easy deflection he’d practiced in his head on the walk over. ”Wanted to know if it was true or just exaggeration.”

”Bit of both, usually, the way most tavern talk goes.” Fessel didn’t press further, apparently satisfied, and returned to his ledger.

Arlen pulled the relevant texts from the shelf and spent the better part of the morning working through them with the same careful, methodical attention he gave everything now — reading slowly, taking notes, cross-referencing one text against another whenever the details seemed to diverge.

The core shape of what he needed was there: Dual-Affinity cultivators were rare but understood, individuals who possessed or Awakened more than one power source, most commonly Mana and Aura together. Society didn’t treat them as impossible anomalies. They were simply unusually gifted — worth remarking on, worth respecting, but not worth the kind of suspicion that might unravel a much larger secret if anyone looked closely enough.

What he needed now was the specific language, the exact vocabulary other people would use to describe someone like him, so that if the question ever came up directly, he’d have an answer ready that sounded like his own honest understanding of himself rather than something rehearsed.

Hybrid cultivator, one text offered. Multi-affinity practitioner, said another, though the more common guild texts favored a simpler, more colloquial phrase — a magic-swordsman , when the combination leaned toward blade work supplemented by spellcraft, which was, Arlen thought, turning the phrase over carefully, close enough to what Enduring Vitality and Water Affinity actually resembled that it might genuinely fit.

Enduring Vitality could pass for Aura, he wrote in his journal, working through the logic methodically. It’s physical. Instinctive. The kind of thing a warrior-type cultivator might Awaken through sheer bodily conditioning. Water Affinity is different — elemental, more like something a mage would develop. If anyone ever asks, that’s the story. I Awakened something physical first, then something elemental. Dual-Affinity. Rare, but understood. Nothing that should invite deeper questions, as long as I don’t let too many abilities pile up too quickly, or let anyone see exactly how they arrived.

He read further, searching specifically for any mention of how such Awakenings were typically triggered, hoping for some detail that might at least partially explain his own experience even if he never shared the true cause with anyone else. Most Dual-Affinity cultivators, the texts agreed, Awakened their second affinity the same way as their first — years of training, or a moment of extreme stress, sometimes both together. Nothing suggested anything as strange or immediate as what Arlen had actually experienced.

That gap troubled him more than he let himself dwell on directly. He was building a cover story that explained the shape of what people would see in him, without explaining, even to himself, the actual mechanism underneath it. He still didn’t understand why eating a creature’s flesh had anything to do with gaining its traits, or why it had happened to him specifically, out of everyone in the world who presumably ate meat regularly without any such effect.

He thought, briefly, of asking someone directly — not about himself, but hypothetically, framed carefully enough to avoid suspicion. He considered Bram, whose decades of tavern gossip and secondhand adventuring stories might have included something, anything, that resembled what he’d experienced.

He decided against it, for now. Not because he distrusted Bram, but because he understood, with the same old, careful instinct that had guided him through eight years of slum survival, that information moved in directions you couldn’t always control once you let it out of your hands. Better to gather what he could quietly, on his own, until he understood the shape of his own secret well enough to know exactly how much of it, if any, was safe to share.

He closed the texts eventually, having absorbed as much as the guild library was likely to offer him, and sat for a while longer at the corner table simply thinking, the light through the high windows shifting slowly toward afternoon.

I have a cover story now, he wrote finally, his handwriting steady. *Dual-Affinity. Aura and Mana, in whatever combination the abilities themselves happen to resemble. It’s not a lie, exactly — not one I’ll ever have to speak outright unless someone asks directly, and even then, I can simply let them draw the conclusion themselves rather than stating anything false. It’s a shape other people already understand and accept. I just need to fit inside it carefully.*

What troubles me is that I still don’t understand the actual truth well enough to know its limits. How many abilities can I gain this way? Is there a cost I haven’t discovered yet? Does it work on every creature, or only certain kinds? I have two data points. That’s not nearly enough to build real confidence on, only enough to build a cautious plan.

For now, the plan is this: keep testing, carefully and privately, whenever the opportunity is safe and low-risk. Keep the cover story ready, in case anyone ever asks directly. And keep watching for any pattern that might explain more of the actual truth, even if I never share that truth with anyone else.

He left the library as the afternoon light began slanting long through the high windows, his mind considerably more settled than it had been that morning, though the unease underneath it hadn’t entirely faded. He made his way to the tavern for dinner, found Cobb and Sil at their usual table, and let himself, for the length of a shared meal, simply be an ordinary Rank F adventurer trading easy conversation about quests and coin and nothing more complicated than that.

”You’ve been buried in the library a lot lately,” Cobb observed, not unkindly, passing him a piece of bread. ”Thinking about taking up scholarship instead of adventuring?”

”Just curious about some things,” Arlen said, smooth enough that Cobb accepted it without a second thought and moved the conversation on to lighter matters.

Arlen ate his stew, laughed at Sil’s dry, understated joke about a merchant’s overpriced boots, and let the ordinary warmth of the evening settle over him — grateful, in a way he hadn’t quite expected to be, for the simple, uncomplicated company of people who didn’t know, and didn’t need to know, exactly how much had changed inside him these past few weeks.

Two abilities, he thought later that night, lying in his bunk and listening to the familiar sounds of the guild’s inn settling around him. A story ready, if anyone asks. A plan, however uncertain, for whatever comes next.

It wasn’t everything. But it was, he thought, a start — the same patient, careful groundwork he’d been laying his entire life, applied now to a mystery even he didn’t fully understand yet.

He closed his eyes, and for the first time since the river, finally slept without the strange, humming disquiet that had followed him since the eel’s warmth first settled into his chest.