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

Chapter 27: Chapter 27 — Second Course

The quest was small enough that Arlen almost passed over it entirely — a request from a fisherman near the Silvermist River’s edge, asking for help clearing out a patch of unusually aggressive marsh eels that had been tangling in his nets and, on one memorable occasion, biting clean through a boot.

Pest Subjugation — Marsh eels, Rank 1, disrupting fishing nets near Silvermist shallows. Reward: 6 Silver, plus any eels recovered may be kept or sold.

Six silver wasn’t much, but the location was close, the danger negligible, and Arlen found himself, in the weeks since the boar, increasingly drawn to exactly this kind of unremarkable quest — not for the coin, though the coin was always welcome, but for the quiet, private question sitting underneath it that he hadn’t yet found a way to ask out loud to anyone.

Was the boar a fluke? Or does this happen every time?

He walked out to the Silvermist’s shallows early the following morning, found the fisherman — a weathered, taciturn man named Oswin who seemed more relieved than curious to have help arrive at all — and spent a companionable hour listening to a description of the eels’ behavior, their usual hiding spots among the reeds, and the particular technique Oswin recommended for pulling one free of a net without losing a finger to its teeth.

"Not dangerous, mind," Oswin said, hauling a torn net up onto the bank for Arlen’s inspection. "Just persistent. And bitey, when they’re cornered."

Arlen spent the better part of the morning clearing the shallows, wading carefully through reed-choked water in a set of borrowed waders Oswin kept for exactly this purpose, pulling eel after eel free of tangled nets and depositing them, still writhing, into a covered bucket at the water’s edge. It was unglamorous, faintly unpleasant work, made bearable mostly by the mild satisfaction of doing something useful with his hands.

By midday he’d cleared eleven eels from the nets — considerably more than the modest infestation the posting had implied — and Oswin, genuinely pleased, insisted Arlen take the lot rather than the guild’s usual arrangement of splitting the catch.

"Can’t eat that many myself, and they don’t keep well past a day or two," Oswin said, waving off Arlen’s polite protest. "You did good work. Take them."

Arlen accepted, more out of practical sense than any particular craving, and made his way to a quiet stretch of riverbank a short distance from Oswin’s modest dock to make camp for the afternoon before the walk back to Greyhaven. He built a small fire, prepared two of the eels for a proper meal, and found himself, as he worked, turning the same quiet question over and over.

He’d read enough now, in his sparse and careful research, to understand that nothing in the guild’s texts described anything like what had happened to him that first night by the fire. No precedent. No warning. Just a boar, a meal, and a name arriving unbidden in his mind.

One data point isn’t a pattern, he told himself, the same careful logic he’d have applied to any uncertain situation. If I want to know whether this repeats, there’s only one way to actually find out.

He ate slowly that evening, deliberately, the eel meat rich and faintly oily over the fire, and found himself paying close attention to every sensation as he did — not with any real expectation, he told himself, simply out of the same methodical curiosity that had once had him studying badge colors from a wall near the western gate.

Nothing happened through the first portion. He ate a second, then a third, working steadily through more of the meat than his appetite strictly demanded, and had nearly convinced himself that the boar had, after all, been some strange, unrepeatable fluke — when the warmth arrived.

It came the same way it had the first time, low and centered in his chest before spreading outward, patient and unmistakable, gathering behind his ribs like something remembered rather than newly learned. Arlen set down what remained of the meal and sat very still, heart already beginning to race, and waited.

The warmth built, steady and absolute, spreading through his limbs the way water spreads through dry cloth — slow at first, then all at once, until it settled somewhere deep and certain, the same quiet click of a key finding its lock.

A second name surfaced in his mind, arriving with the same wordless, undeniable clarity as the first.

Water Affinity.

He sat frozen for a long moment afterward, the fire crackling beside him, the ordinary sounds of the river drifting past in the growing dusk, and felt something in his chest that was equal parts wonder and a creeping, unmistakable unease.

It’s real, he thought. It’s not a fluke. It happens every time.

He tested the ability carefully once the disorientation passed, wading into the shallow water at the river’s edge and finding, almost immediately, a strange new comfort in the current against his legs — not simply tolerance, but something closer to ease, an instinctive awareness of the water’s movement that he hadn’t possessed that same morning. He held his breath and ducked briefly beneath the surface, and found, to his genuine astonishment, that the burning need to breathe took considerably longer to arrive than it should have.

He surfaced, gasping more from surprise than actual need, and stood in the shallow water turning the discovery over with something close to disbelief.

Two abilities. Two different creatures. Both times, I ate enough of something new, and both times, something changed.

He returned to the fire and sat there for a long while, staring into the flames without really seeing them, the full weight of what this meant slowly settling into place alongside the ability itself. This wasn’t a single strange event to quietly set aside and move past. This was a pattern — a rule, even, though he didn’t yet understand its full shape or its limits. Every new creature, it seemed, carried the possibility of something new waiting inside it.

He opened his journal that evening with hands that trembled slightly, less from fear than from the sheer scale of what he was beginning to understand about himself.

It happened again. Marsh eel this time, not the boar. Same warmth, same certainty, same name arriving whole in my mind. Water Affinity — some kind of comfort and capability in water, still testing the full extent of it, but real, and unmistakable.

This isn’t a fluke. It’s not a one-time thing. Whatever this is, it seems to happen whenever I eat enough of something I haven’t eaten before. Different creature, different ability, both times.

I don’t know why this is happening to me, or what caused it, or whether there’s a limit to how many times it can repeat. But I understand now that I can’t keep treating this as a strange, isolated night to quietly forget about. This is something ongoing. Something I need to actually plan around, properly, rather than just wait and see.

I think I need to go back to the library. Properly, this time. Not just curious questions about Dual-Affinity cultivators in passing. I need to understand what language exists for this, what story I can tell people that won’t invite the wrong kind of attention — because if this keeps happening, and I suspect it will, I’m going to need an answer ready before anyone thinks to ask the question.

He closed the journal, banked the fire, and lay back against his bedroll staring up at a sky thick with stars, the sound of the river’s steady current somehow more comforting now than it had been that morning — a small, private confirmation of everything that had just changed.

Two abilities. Two creatures. A pattern taking shape, vast and unknown, stretching out ahead of him like the boundary he’d once stood at the edge of, humbled by its scale.

He didn’t sleep easily that night. But when he finally did, it was with the same quiet, steady resolve that had carried him through eight years of careful waiting — the understanding that whatever this was becoming, he would meet it the same way he’d met everything else.

Carefully. Patiently. One step, and one strange, wondrous discovery, at a time.