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

Chapter 12: Chapter 12 — The Board

The quest board took up an entire wall of the guild hall’s ground floor, and Arlen stood in front of it for a solid five minutes before he admitted to himself that he had no idea how to actually read it.

It wasn’t the words that troubled him — he could read well enough now, slowly but reliably, thanks to years spent badgering the reading room clerk. It was the sheer volume of postings pinned across the board, layered two and three deep in places, each one scrawled in a different hand, using guild shorthand he only half understood.

*Herb Gathering — Silverleaf, 3 bundles — Outer Forest, North Trail — Reward: 8 Silver*

Escort — Merchant caravan to Ironpeak Hills — 4 days — Reward: 2 Gold, meals included

Monster Subjugation — Dire wolf pack, confirmed sighting near Hollow Creek — Rank D+ recommended — Reward: 15 Silver + pelts

Investigation — Strange lights reported near Fallen Star Ruins — Reward: Negotiable

That last one caught his eye and held it a beat too long — ruins, the word alone enough to send a small, familiar thrill through his chest — before he made himself look away. He wasn’t foolish enough to think a Rank F adventurer with a two-day-old sword belonged anywhere near a posting that used the word negotiable.

"You’re doing the thing," said a voice beside him.

He turned to find Mina Ashford standing a few feet away, arms crossed, a faint, knowing amusement on her face.

"What thing?"

"Staring at the postings you shouldn’t touch yet like they’re going to disappear if you look away." She stepped up beside him, scanning the board with the ease of someone who’d read it a thousand times before. "Every new adventurer does it. The dangerous ones look more interesting because they’re dangerous. Doesn’t mean they’re right for you."

"I wasn’t going to take it," Arlen said, a little defensively.

"I believe you. I’m just saving you the trouble of talking yourself into it in a week." She tapped a finger against a cluster of postings near the bottom corner of the board, the unglamorous ones, the kind Arlen had been carefully avoiding out of some vague sense that they were beneath the sword now sitting at his hip. "These are yours, for now. Gathering, low-risk delivery, minor pest clearing. Boring. Also how you don’t die in your first month."

Arlen looked over the cluster properly. Silverleaf gathering, 8 Silver. Firewood delivery to a hunting outpost, 4 Silver. Rat infestation in a grain cellar, 5 Silver plus a meal.

"That’s not much coin," he said, doing the math out of old habit — eight silver was less than a single gold coin, and a gold coin, he’d learned over the years of watching adventurers pass through the gate, didn’t go nearly as far as it sounded like it should once you accounted for gear, food, and lodging.

"No," Mina agreed. "It’s not. Rank F quests never are. But you’re not taking them for the coin. You’re taking them to build a completion record, learn the terrain, and prove to the guild — and yourself — that you can actually do what you say you’ll do." She glanced sideways at him. "Every adventurer who matters started exactly here. Even the ones with noble names and family swords. Nobody skips this part."

Arlen studied the Silverleaf posting again. Eight silver for three bundles of an herb he was reasonably sure he could identify, gathered from the outer forest’s north trail — a stretch of woodland he’d actually walked the very edge of before, years ago, gathering firewood as a boy. Familiar ground. Manageable risk.

"I’ll take this one," he said.

Mina nodded, unpinned the posting, and walked him back to the registration counter to log it properly. "Silverleaf’s got a distinctive smell once you know it — sharp, almost minty, grows low to the ground near damp soil. There’s a guide in the guild library if you want to study the plant before you go looking for it. I’d recommend it. Rank F adventurers waste more time misidentifying plants than doing almost anything else out there."

"I know a bit about plants already," Arlen said. "Grew up gathering what I could find, before I could afford not to."

Something in Mina’s businesslike expression flickered again, the same faint reassessment he’d noticed during registration. "Slum-raised," she said, not quite a question.

"Since I can remember."

"That’ll serve you better out there than half the merchant sons who come through this door thinking a sword makes up for never having gone hungry a day in their lives." She logged the quest against his badge number with quick, efficient strokes of her quill. "Bring back the Silverleaf in good condition — bruised or wilted bundles get docked pay — and I’ll process your reward same day. Eight silver, minus nothing, if the quality’s there."

"Understood."

"One more thing." She glanced up at him. "Guild takes a small registration tax on your first ten completed quests — one silver per task, capped after that. Covers your badge upkeep and journal binding. After your first ten, it drops to nothing unless you break guild rules and end up fined. Just so the number doesn’t surprise you when it’s smaller than you expected."

Arlen did the math quickly. Eight silver, minus one silver. Not much of a difference, but the kind of detail he appreciated her mentioning plainly rather than letting him discover it disappointed.

"Thank you," he said, and meant it.

He left the guild hall that afternoon with the quest logged against his name, his short sword belted at his hip, and the last of his coin — a little over three silver, all that remained after the armor, the sword, and the registration fee — folded carefully back into his money belt. It wasn’t much of a cushion. He was aware, walking toward the guild’s small attached inn to inquire about a bed for the night, of exactly how thin the margin actually was between where he stood now and where hunger used to live.

The innkeeper, a broad, weathered woman running the guild’s boarding house with brisk efficiency, quoted him two copper a night for a shared bunk room, or six copper for a private one barely large enough to turn around in.

"Shared’s fine," Arlen said, doing the arithmetic without needing to think about it — six nights in the shared room for the price of two in the private one, and the eight silver from the Silverleaf quest still two days away at best.

He paid for three nights in advance — six copper total — and carried his small pack up to the bunk room, where two other young adventurers, gear scattered across their own bunks, glanced up at him with the mild, wordless acknowledgment of strangers sharing temporary space.

He lay down that night with the ceiling close overhead and the low murmur of the guild hall’s evening business still audible through the floor, and found himself doing the same careful accounting he’d done every night for the past eight years — coin in, coin out, the narrow margin between them — except now, for the first time, the numbers belonged to an actual adventurer’s ledger instead of a slum boy’s hoarded copper pouch.

Eight silver, he thought, turning the quest posting over in his mind one more time before sleep found him. Three bundles of Silverleaf. The north trail. Tomorrow.

It wasn’t much. But it was, finally, entirely his own.