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

Chapter 26: Chapter 26 — A Question of Origins

The walk back to Greyhaven the next morning gave Arlen ample time to think, and by the time the city walls came into view, he’d settled on very little beyond a single, firm conclusion: he couldn’t tell anyone the truth.

I ate a boar and gained an ability was not a story he could tell a soul, not even Bram, not even Mina, without inviting a level of scrutiny he instinctively understood would be dangerous. He didn’t fully know why it felt dangerous — only that something in him, old and careful, recognized the shape of a secret worth keeping close, the same instinct that had once taught a slum child which conversations were safe to have in front of which adults.

He turned the moss and boar goods in at the guild first, business as usual — Mina processing the quest without any indication that anything about him seemed different, which was, he supposed, its own small relief. Twelve silver for the moss, plus an additional 3 silver Mina offered for the boar hide once he mentioned he had one to sell, the meat itself already portioned out for his own use over the coming week.

"Clean kill?" she asked, glancing at the hide’s condition.

"Cleaner than I expected," Arlen said, which was true enough without inviting further questions.

He spent that evening at the tavern with Cobb and Sil, same as most evenings, and found himself unusually quiet through the meal, turning the previous night’s events over and over without arriving anywhere useful.

"You’re somewhere else tonight," Cobb observed, around a mouthful of bread.

"Just tired. Long walk back."

It wasn’t a lie, exactly, though it wasn’t the truth either, and Arlen found the taste of that small omission sitting a little uncomfortably with him even as he offered it. He wasn’t used to holding things back from the people he’d started, cautiously, to consider something like friends.

He didn’t have any framework yet for what had happened to him — no guild text, no tavern rumor, no half-remembered fragment of Bram’s old stories that matched a warmth spreading through his chest and a name simply arriving, whole and certain, in his mind. He’d checked, carefully and without drawing attention to what he was actually looking for, whether any of the guild library’s sparse materials on Awakening described anything similar. They didn’t. Awakenings, as far as anything he could find described them, came after years of dedicated training, or from a moment of extreme physical or emotional stress — a near-death experience, a battlefield crisis, the kind of dramatic turning point that made for a proper story.

He had simply eaten dinner.

Maybe it was a fluke, he wrote in his journal that night, turning the possibility over with the same careful skepticism he applied to most convenient explanations. Maybe whatever’s happened to me is a one-time thing, not something that repeats. I don’t know enough yet to guess either way.

For now, I’ll keep it to myself. If it happens again — if there’s a pattern here, not just a single strange night — I’ll need to think harder about how to explain it, to the guild and to everyone else. But one unexplained thing is easier to keep quiet than a habit. I’ll wait and see.

He tested Enduring Vitality carefully over the following days, in small, deliberate increments, always alone, always somewhere private enough that no one would notice a Rank F adventurer running conditioning drills well past the point his body should reasonably have given out. He confirmed what he’d suspected that first night — his stamina had genuinely, measurably increased, not dramatically, not in a way that would make him stand out in open combat, but enough that he recovered faster, pushed longer, tired later than he once had.

He didn’t tell Torv, when he stopped by the Smith’s District to finally purchase the hunting knife he’d been saving toward. He didn’t tell Mina, when he took on his next quest — a straightforward delivery, 5 silver, nothing that tested his new endurance in any meaningful way. He didn’t tell Bram, on the one evening he found the old man on his usual bench and sat with him a while, trading easy, familiar conversation about nothing in particular.

He simply carried the secret quietly, the way he’d carried most things in his life — patiently, without complaint, waiting to see what shape it would take before deciding how much of it he needed to share with anyone else.

I keep coming back to the same thought, he wrote, near the end of that first week back. Whatever this is, it happened because I ate that boar. I don’t know why, and I don’t know if it’ll happen again with something else. But if it does — if I start noticing a pattern — I’ll need a better plan than just staying quiet and hoping nobody asks the wrong question.

For now, though, there’s only one strange night, and one strange name, and no proof of anything beyond what I can already do a little better than I could a week ago.

I’ll wait. I’ll watch. And if it happens again, I’ll figure out the rest then.

He closed the journal, blew out his candle, and lay in the dark listening to the familiar sounds of the guild’s bunk room settling for the night — Cobb’s steady breathing, the distant murmur of the tavern below, the ordinary rhythm of a life that looked, from the outside, exactly as it had a week earlier.

Only Arlen knew it wasn’t, not anymore. Something had shifted, quiet and permanent, somewhere beneath the surface of his ordinary days — and though he didn’t yet understand its full shape, he found, turning onto his side and finally letting sleep take him, that he wasn’t afraid of it.

If anything, he was curious to see what came next.