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

Chapter 32: Chapter 32 — What the Ruins Remember

Eldrin didn’t sleep well that night, Arlen could tell — the professor sat by the fire long after Halvard had turned in, sketching the strange carving from memory into his notebook by firelight, muttering occasionally to himself in a way that suggested his mind hadn’t left the ruin at all.

Arlen busied himself with dinner instead, grateful for something concrete to do with his hands while the mystery of the symbol sat unresolved. He’d brought dried provisions same as always, but Halvard had proven, somewhat to Arlen’s delight, to be a capable hand with a snare, and between the two of them they’d managed to bring down a brace of wild hens roosting near a nearby thicket.

"Never had these prepared properly," Halvard admitted, watching Arlen work. "Usually just spit them whole and call it done."

"Nothing wrong with that," Arlen said, "but if you’ve got the time, a little more care goes a long way." He’d picked up the habit somewhere in these past months — not from any deliberate decision, just an accumulating pleasure in doing even a simple camp meal properly rather than merely adequately. He rubbed the hens with a small pouch of dried herbs he’d started carrying specifically for this purpose, wild rosemary and a pinch of salt purchased cheaply from a market stall, and set them to roast slow over the coals rather than direct flame.

It was, he reflected, turning the spit with unhurried attention, one of the small private joys he’d promised himself in that other life, on that other world, back when a hot meal eaten slowly had felt like an impossible luxury rather than an ordinary Tuesday. He still caught himself sometimes, in quiet moments like this one, marveling at the simple fact that he was here at all — crouched by a fire outside a ruin nobody had properly mapped in centuries, cooking a meal he’d chosen to make well rather than simply fast, with the whole unexplored world stretching out somewhere beyond the firelight.

"That smells considerably better than anything I’ve managed on past expeditions," Eldrin said, finally setting his notebook aside as the hens finished roasting. "You’ve a gift for this."

"Practice, mostly. And motivation." Arlen portioned out the meal, offering the professor the first plate. "Man doesn’t get many good meals growing up poor. Makes you appreciate them properly, once you can actually afford to."

Eldrin accepted the plate with evident gratitude, and for a while the three of them ate in comfortable, unhurried silence, the fire crackling low, the strange tension of the day’s discovery easing, at least temporarily, under the simple pleasure of a meal shared well.

"Best camp meal I’ve had in years," Eldrin admitted eventually, setting down a well-picked bone. "You ought to consider the guild’s culinary postings, alongside everything else. There’s coin in that too, for adventurers willing to document regional cooking properly. Guild’s Monster Cuisine Encyclopedia is embarrassingly thin, last I checked."

"I might," Arlen said, and found the idea settling into him with more genuine appeal than he’d expected. He thought of the small, careful notes he’d already been keeping in his journal — not just about abilities and monsters, but about tastes, about which herbs paired well with which meats, about the particular satisfaction of eating something he’d hunted, prepared, and earned himself, all in the same day. It felt, in its own quiet way, like part of the same promise he’d made himself back on Earth, dying in a gray apartment having never once properly tasted the world.

They returned to the carving the following morning, Eldrin’s unease from the previous evening giving way to a more focused, scholarly determination as daylight made the work easier. He spent hours carefully clearing the full extent of the symbol and the stonework surrounding it, Arlen and Halvard assisting with the slow, patient labor of debris removal while Eldrin documented every detail with meticulous care.

"It’s not decorative," Eldrin said finally, sitting back on his heels to survey the fully exposed carving. "Decorative stonework from this era tends toward repeating floral or geometric patterns — I’ve seen dozens of examples. This is something else. More like... notation. A marker of some kind."

"Marking what?" Arlen asked.

"That’s rather the question, isn’t it." Eldrin studied the symbol a moment longer — a series of angular lines radiating outward from a central point, unlike anything Arlen had seen in any of the guild library’s reference texts either. "I’ve a colleague at the capital archive who might recognize it. I’ll need to send a proper rubbing and my notes back with the guild courier once we return."

"Is it dangerous?" Halvard asked, practical as always.

"I don’t know," Eldrin admitted, and something in his voice made clear how much that admission cost him. "That’s what troubles me. A scholar’s meant to know these things, or at least know where to find the answer. This, I genuinely don’t recognize, and that’s happened to me perhaps twice in twenty years of this work."

They spent the remainder of the day completing a careful survey of the rest of the site, uncovering nothing further quite so strange as the carving, though Eldrin remained visibly preoccupied throughout, returning again and again to sketch additional angles of the symbol whenever a spare moment allowed.

That evening, over another careful meal — a simple stew this time, root vegetables and the last of their dried meat, seasoned with whatever wild herbs Arlen had gathered near the campsite through the day — Eldrin finally set his notebook aside long enough to speak more openly.

"I want to be honest with you both," he said. "This site is older and stranger than I expected, and I don’t yet understand what that carving means. I’ll report it properly to the guild and the capital archive, and in all likelihood, it will turn out to be nothing more than an unfamiliar regional variant of something already documented elsewhere. That’s the most probable explanation, and I don’t want either of you losing sleep over speculation."

"But you’re not entirely convinced of that," Arlen said.

Eldrin was quiet for a moment, firelight flickering across his tired, thoughtful face. "No," he admitted. "I’m not entirely convinced. Scholarly instinct, nothing more concrete than that. But instinct’s occasionally worth listening to, in this line of work."

Arlen thought of Bram’s old advice, turned it over the way he turned over most things now, and found it fit here as well as it had fit everywhere else. Ask questions before you charge in. Eldrin, it seemed, had already learned that lesson decades before Arlen had, in his own careful, scholarly way.

They broke camp the following morning for the return journey, the carving carefully documented, rubbed, and sketched for proper study back in Greyhaven, and Arlen found himself thinking, on the long walk home, less about the mystery itself and more about the particular thrill of having stood at the edge of something genuinely unknown — not a rumor, not a tavern story, but an actual unanswered question, freshly uncovered, waiting for someone patient enough to eventually solve it.

Rank D preferred, and I still got to be part of this, he wrote in his journal that night, back at the guild’s inn, the taste of Eldrin’s genuine gratitude for the meals still warm in his memory alongside everything else the trip had given him. A strange symbol nobody recognizes. A professor more unsettled than he wanted to admit. And somewhere in all of it, my own small discovery — that I love this work as much for the quiet moments, the cooking, the careful patient labor, as I do for whatever mystery waits at the end of it.

I don’t know what that carving means yet. I don’t think anyone does. But I intend to still be around, whenever the answer finally surfaces.