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

Chapter 7: Chapter 7 — The Taste of Adventure

The old man’s name was Bram, and Arlen had seen him around the guild district for the better part of a year before he ever worked up the nerve to speak to him.

He was hard to miss, honestly — a broad-shouldered man well past his fighting years, one leg stiff enough that he walked with a slight hitch, and a face weathered into deep lines that made him look older than he probably was. He spent most afternoons at a particular bench outside the guild hall’s tavern, nursing a single mug of ale for hours, watching the younger adventurers come and go with an expression that was hard to read — not quite envy, not quite nostalgia, something in between.

Arlen had gathered, from bits of overheard conversation, that Bram had once been a fairly accomplished adventurer himself, back before a monster’s claw had done something permanent to his knee. Now he mostly just watched.

Arlen understood watching. It was, after all, mostly what he did too.

"You’re the boy who sits on the wall," Bram said one afternoon, without preamble, when Arlen happened to be passing close enough to the bench that avoiding conversation would have been awkward. "Near the western gate."

"Sometimes," Arlen admitted.

"Every day I’ve walked past, more like." Bram took a slow sip of his ale, studying Arlen over the rim of the mug. "What is it you’re looking for out there?"

Arlen considered lying, or deflecting, the way he usually did with adults who asked too many questions. But there was something in the old man’s tone — tired, but genuinely curious, without the faint mockery he usually braced himself for — that made him answer honestly instead.

"Everything, I suppose," he said. "I want to know what it’s like. Out there. Past the forest."

Bram grunted, which might have meant anything, and gestured with his mug toward the empty space on the bench beside him. Arlen sat.

"Past the forest," Bram repeated, turning the words over like he was testing their weight. "You know what’s past the forest, boy?"

"No," Arlen admitted. "That’s rather the point."

That got something close to a laugh out of the old man — a short, rough sound, like it hadn’t been exercised much lately. "Fair enough. Fair enough." He was quiet for a moment, looking out over the guild district’s busy square, at the adventurers coming and going, the merchants haggling, the general noisy churn of a city that never quite stopped moving. "I’ll tell you what I know, then. Might save you some grief later."

And so, in fits and starts over the following weeks, Bram told him.

He told him about the Ironpeak Hills to the north, where the ore ran so rich you could sometimes find veins of it exposed right on the surface after a hard rain, and about the miners who worked those hills, who had their own particular superstitions about which tunnels to avoid and why. He told him about the Whispering Marsh to the south, thick with poisonous vapors that could make a man see things that weren’t there if he wasn’t careful about which paths he walked.

"World’s bigger than any of that, mind you," Bram said one afternoon, when Arlen had pressed him — gently, the way he’d learned to press without seeming pushy — about what lay beyond the Ashen Frontier entirely. "I never went further than Moonfang Pass myself. Knee gave out before I got the chance. But I met plenty who had. Adventurers passing through, telling stories over drinks."

"What kind of stories?"

Bram’s eyes went distant for a moment, the particular look of a man remembering things fondly, from a safe distance. "Heard tell of a kingdom out east where they build half their cities on the backs of turtles so old and so large, the turtles don’t even notice the cities are there anymore. Heard of floating islands somewhere south, kept up by old magic nobody quite remembers how to make anymore. Heard of a desert where the sand itself sings, if the wind hits it right." He shook his head slowly. "Don’t know how much of that’s true and how much’s just tavern talk grown taller with every telling. But I liked hearing it either way."

Arlen sat very still, drinking in every word like a man dying of thirst.

"The world rewards those who prepare," Bram told him another day, more seriously, when Arlen had asked — bluntly, the way children sometimes manage to ask things adults dance around — what it actually took to survive out there. "That’s the truest thing I can tell you. It’s not about being the strongest, or the bravest, though it helps to have some of both. It’s about knowing what you’re walking into before you walk into it. Half the adventurers I watched die in my years, they died because they didn’t know something they could’ve known, if they’d bothered asking first."

"Asking who?"

"Anyone who’d tell them. Doesn’t matter who." Bram tapped the side of his head. "Old dockhands. Retired soldiers. Herbalists. Cooks, even — cooks know more about which plants’ll kill you than half the healers in this city, on account of having to sort the poisonous ones out of the stew pot. Point is, the world’s full of people who know pieces of things. You collect enough pieces, you start seeing the whole shape of it."

Arlen turned that over carefully, the way he turned over most of what Bram told him, filing it away alongside everything else he’d been gathering — the badge colors, the smell of ironhide boar, the quiet grace of the elf he’d watched pass through the gate months ago.

"You’re a strange sort of boy," Bram said, not unkindly, watching him think. "Most children your age want stories about monsters and glory. You want to know how the roads are maintained and what herbs cure a fever."

"I want the stories too," Arlen said. "But I figure the herbs matter more, if I want to be around long enough to have stories of my own."

Bram studied him for a long moment, something unreadable moving behind his weathered face. "Aye," he said finally, quiet. "I expect you might be right about that."

He didn’t offer to train Arlen, exactly — his knee wouldn’t have allowed for much of that even if he’d wanted to. But he kept talking to him, afternoon after afternoon, in the unhurried way of a man with more time than purpose, passing along whatever scraps of hard-won knowledge occurred to him. And Arlen kept listening, filing it all away, letting the shape of the wider world slowly assemble itself in his mind out of a hundred small, secondhand pieces.

He still had years before he’d be old enough to walk through that gate himself. But for the first time, the waiting didn’t feel entirely empty. It felt, instead, like the quiet, necessary work of building something — piece by piece, story by story, coin by careful coin — that would, eventually, carry him further than any wall could show him.