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

Chapter 2: Chapter 2 — Rebirth

The first thing the baby did, in this new world, was cry — loudly, indignantly, as if he had a great many complaints and intended to voice every one of them immediately.

"Well, there’s a good pair of lungs," said the midwife, laughing as she wrapped him in a scrap of clean linen. "This one’s going to be trouble."

She had no idea how right she was.

He didn’t know it yet, of course. He didn’t know much of anything yet, beyond the fact that the world was bright and loud and that someone kept putting him against something warm that smelled faintly of woodsmoke and bread. That warmth turned out to belong to a woman with tired eyes and a soft voice, who held him like he was the best thing that had happened to her in a long while.

She called him a name. He didn’t understand it, but he liked the sound of it — mostly because it always seemed to come with food.

Life, for a baby, is a wonderfully simple business. There is sleeping. There is eating. There is the occasional outrage over not being fed quite fast enough. And there is, in between all of that, an awful lot of staring — at ceilings, at fingers, at the particular way dust floated through a shaft of afternoon light like it had somewhere important to be.

He found his own hands fascinating. He held them up and studied them with the intense, serious focus of a scholar examining an ancient text, and then, having learned nothing useful, put them straight into his mouth instead.

The woman who cared for him laughed at that more than once.

"You’ll chew on anything, won’t you," she said, prying his fist gently away from his own foot. "Curious little thing."

He didn’t know that curiosity would turn out to be the truest word anyone ever said about him.

The room he grew up in was small and crowded — not just with people, but with sound. There were always other children nearby, other small voices adding to the general chaos, and always someone’s laughter somewhere close by, even on the days when food was scarce and the roof leaked in three different places whenever it rained. It wasn’t a grand life. But it was, in its own noisy, crowded way, a warm one.

He learned to sit up, and thought this was a marvelous achievement, and celebrated by immediately falling back over.

He learned to crawl, and used this new skill mainly to get into things he had no business getting into — a basket of yarn here, a forgotten crust of bread there, the hem of anyone’s clothing who happened to be standing nearby.

He learned to pull himself upright using whatever was available — a stool, a wall, once memorably a very startled cat — and stood there wobbling with the triumphant look of a man who has just conquered a mountain.

The world, at that age, was made almost entirely of small delights. The particular crunch of dry leaves outside the door. The way rain sounded different depending on how hard it fell. The taste of the little bits of honeyed bread the woman sometimes slipped him when she thought no one else was looking, pressing a finger to her lips as if they were sharing a wonderful secret.

He didn’t know, yet, about slums or coin or the hard edges of the world outside that small warm room. He didn’t need to. His world was this — a bowl, a blanket, a familiar voice, and an endless, cheerful curiosity about absolutely everything he encountered.

When he finally took his first real steps — three wobbling, triumphant steps across the floor before landing squarely on his backside — the whole room erupted into applause, as if he’d just crossed some great finish line instead of stumbling from one side of a cramped room to the other.

"Look at him go," someone said, delighted. "Give it a few years and there’ll be no keeping track of him at all."

They meant it as a joke.

It would turn out to be something closer to a prophecy.

There was no ghost of another life in him yet — no half-remembered office, no rain-soaked commute, no dying wish whispered into a dark ceiling somewhere very far away and very long ago, in a life he hadn’t even begun to remember he’d lived. Whatever he had been before this, it slept quietly somewhere he couldn’t yet reach, leaving him free to simply be — small, loud, endlessly curious, and entirely delighted by the business of being alive.

He was, by every account, an unusually cheerful child. He smiled easily. He laughed at things that startled other children into tears — a loud clap of thunder, once, sent half the room’s children scattering while he simply blinked up at the ceiling and giggled, delighted by the noise. He had a habit of reaching for things just out of his grasp, stretching his whole small body toward whatever caught his eye, as if some part of him already understood that the most interesting things in life were usually just a little out of reach.

The woman who raised him noticed it, in her quieter moments.

"You’ve got the wandering spirit in you," she told him once, only half joking, as she watched him try — and fail, spectacularly — to climb over the lip of a laundry basket toward a particularly interesting beetle on the floor beyond it. "Heaven help whoever has to keep up with you."

He didn’t understand the words. But he laughed anyway, because she was laughing, and because the beetle was still there, and because the whole enormous, half-understood world still seemed like the most exciting thing he had ever encountered.

He didn’t know yet that the room was crowded because it was in the poorest part of a city called Greyhaven. He didn’t know that the woman holding him wasn’t his mother, or that the woman who had been his mother was already gone, in a way too complicated for a child his age to understand. He didn’t know that hunger would soon become a more frequent visitor, or that this small warm room was only the very first, gentlest Chapter of a much harder one still to come.

For now, there was only the wide, bright business of being small and new and wonderfully, endlessly curious — one wobbling step at a time, toward a world he couldn’t wait to explore, even if he didn’t yet know that he was waiting for anything at all.