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

Chapter 14: Chapter 14 — Growing Pains

The weeks that followed fell into a rhythm Arlen hadn’t quite expected but found himself grateful for anyway — wake early, check the board, take whatever suited a Rank F adventurer, complete it carefully, return, report, rest. Unglamorous work. He didn’t mind. Eight years of watching from a wall had taught him patience long before the guild ever asked it of him.

He gathered Silverleaf twice more before Mina gently suggested he diversify. "Guild likes seeing range on a completion record," she told him, "not just one skill proven three times over." So he took a firewood delivery to a hunting outpost a half-day’s walk north instead — 5 silver for the trip, minus the flat 1 silver registration tax, netting him 4 silver clean. He took a letter delivery next, sealed correspondence from a Greyhaven merchant to a trading partner two hours south, and earned 4 silver for what amounted to a pleasant walk through open countryside.

The quests themselves rarely tested him. What they built, quietly, was something else — a name the guild staff recognized without needing explanation, a face that no longer required the badge pinned at his collar to prove he belonged there.

Not every quest went smoothly.

The one that taught him the most was, fittingly, the one he botched.

A farmer on the city’s outer edge posted a small bounty — 6 silver — for locating a goat that had wandered off during a storm three days prior. Simple enough, Arlen thought, accepting it with the easy confidence of a man who’d just completed four quests without incident. He spent the better part of a day following what he was certain were goat tracks through the scrubland bordering the forest, only to corner the animal in question and discover it belonged to a neighboring farm entirely, and had never been lost at all.

"That’s not Bessa," the farmer told him flatly, watching Arlen proudly herd the wrong goat toward the wrong homestead. "That’s Whitmore’s goat. Wanders onto my land near about every week, has done for years. You tracked me the wrong animal, boy."

Arlen stood there, red-faced, the actual missing goat still out in the scrubland somewhere, and understood, with the particular clarity of genuine embarrassment, that confidence and competence were not the same thing at all.

"I’ll find her," he said.

He did, a full day later than he’d hoped, after finally thinking to ask the farmer for a proper description of Bessa’s coloring and habits instead of trusting his own assumptions. The real goat had gotten herself tangled in a bramble patch near a streambed, unharmed but thoroughly unhappy about it.

The farmer paid the full 6 silver anyway, more out of relief than satisfaction, but Arlen logged the lesson in his journal that night with more care than he’d given the quest itself:

Tracking isn’t just following prints. Ask better questions before you start walking. I assumed instead of asking, and it cost me an extra day. Won’t make that mistake twice.

He didn’t. The next tracking quest he accepted — locating a strayed hunting dog for a guild member’s family, 5 silver reward — he spent a full ten minutes questioning the owner about the dog’s habits before setting foot outside the gate, and found the animal within two hours.

Slowly, without any single dramatic moment marking the change, Arlen began recognizing faces around the guild hall. The dwarf running the material exchange counter, gruff but fair, started greeting him by name rather than by rank. A young human archer named Cobb and a quiet beastkin tracker named Sil, who bunked near him at the guild’s attached inn, had taken to sharing a table with him most evenings, trading notes on which postings paid fairly and which didn’t.

"You’re doing that thing again," Cobb said one evening, watching Arlen eat a bowl of stew with more evident satisfaction than the modest meal — 3 copper, cheap even by inn standards — probably warranted.

"What thing?"

"Smiling at your food like it personally did you a favor."

"It sort of did." Arlen didn’t elaborate further than that, and Cobb, who Arlen had gathered came from a comfortable merchant family and had never gone hungry a day in his life, didn’t press. Sil, characteristically quieter, simply nudged an extra piece of bread across the table without comment, which Arlen understood well enough to accept without fuss.

By the end of his third week as a registered adventurer, Arlen had completed eight quests and earned a little over 33 silver total before deductions — enough that he’d finally allowed himself a proper set of oiled boots from a cobbler near the Smith’s District, 12 silver well spent after his first pair had started letting in water on a rainy gathering trip. He still slept in the shared bunk room, still ate mostly bread and dried meat between the occasional hot meal, but the sharp-edged worry that had defined every coin he’d spent as a boy had softened, gradually, into something closer to ordinary caution.

Two quests remained before the registration tax stopped altogether. Not that the silver mattered quite as much to him now — he’d started measuring his progress less by coin and more by the slowly thickening weight of his journal, each new entry another small piece of the shape he was building.

He completed his ninth quest — a simple pest clearing in a grain cellar, five copper-sized rats dispatched without difficulty, 5 silver earned — and his tenth not two days later, a straightforward herb delivery that paid 6 silver and finally closed out the registration fee for good.

"That’s the last of it," Mina told him, counting out the full 6 silver without deduction for the first time since he’d registered. "No more flat tax. Whatever you earn from here is yours in full."

Arlen looked at the coins on the counter, unremarkable in themselves, and felt something settle quietly into place — a small threshold crossed, the kind that wouldn’t mean much to anyone watching from outside, but meant a great deal to a boy who’d once counted coppers by candlelight in a room with three other children and a leaking roof.

"Thank you," he said, and meant it more than the words probably conveyed.

He was still Rank F. He hadn’t stepped past the outer forest’s edge, hadn’t seen a fraction of what he knew waited beyond it. But walking back out into the evening square with his coin purse a little heavier and his boots finally dry, Arlen thought, for the first time since arriving at the guild’s doors, that he was no longer simply playing at being an adventurer.

He was, however modestly, becoming one.