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

Chapter 8: Chapter 8 — Years of Work

The years between eleven and seventeen didn’t pass so much as accumulate, the way coins accumulate in a jar — slowly, unevenly, each one unremarkable on its own, until one day you shake the jar and are startled by the weight of it.

Arlen grew taller, then broader, in the uneven way boys do, all at once in places and not at all in others. His voice dropped somewhere around thirteen, cracking embarrassingly for the better part of a year before settling into something steadier. He kept working — hauling water for the tannery until he outgrew the wage they were willing to pay a boy his age, then moving on to better-paying work at the docks, loading and unloading cargo alongside men twice his size, who mocked him at first and stopped mocking him once they noticed he never once complained and never once slowed down.

He kept saving. The pouch sewn into his shirt gave way, eventually, to a small strongbox he kept hidden beneath a loose floorboard in the corner of whatever room he happened to be sleeping in that year — the tenements shifted, sometimes, as buildings condemned and reassigned and children aged out of one shared room into another. But the strongbox came with him each time, and it grew heavier by careful degrees, coin by coin, year by year.

Not every year was a good one.

The winter he turned thirteen, a fever swept through the slum district, the kind that took the very old and the very young with equal indifference. Arlen caught it too, and spent the better part of two weeks half-conscious in a corner of Old Maren’s room, sweating through a straw pallet while she pressed cool rags to his forehead and muttered darkly about the state of the world.

He survived it. Denna’s younger brother did not.

Arlen remembered standing at the edge of the small, unmarked grave they dug for him in the paupers’ field outside the slum wall, watching Denna’s face — set and hard and refusing, absolutely refusing, to cry in front of anyone — and feeling something in his chest crack open that had nothing to do with the fever still working its way out of his blood.

He didn’t have any grand realization in that moment. No new resolve, no dramatic vow. He simply understood, more clearly than he had before, that the world he’d chosen to chase was not a gentle one, and that wanting something enormous didn’t make the wanting of it any less dangerous.

He kept working anyway. If anything, he worked harder.

The following spring, he made his first real mistake — the kind that taught him more than a dozen careful successes could have. A merchant hired him to help catalogue a shipment of dried herbs, promising a full silver for the day’s work, and Arlen, eager for the coin, hadn’t thought to ask enough questions about which herbs were which before he started sorting them by smell and appearance, the way Bram had once told him cooks and herbalists often did.

He mixed up two nearly identical bundles — one perfectly safe, the other, as it turned out, mildly toxic if brewed the wrong way — and the merchant discovered the error only after selling several packets to an apothecary across town. Nobody was seriously hurt, in the end, but the apothecary was furious, the merchant was furious, and Arlen went home that evening not only without his promised silver, but having been shouted at in front of half the market district for his carelessness.

He sat on the low wall near the western gate that night longer than usual, turning the humiliation over in his mind, testing it for lessons the way he tested most things.

I knew enough to sound confident, he thought eventually, but not enough to actually be right. That’s worse than knowing nothing at all.

It was, he decided, an important distinction. From then on, he made a point of admitting what he didn’t know, rather than guessing and hoping his guesses held.

The wins, when they came, were smaller and quieter than the failures, but they mattered more to him for exactly that reason.

There was the afternoon, not long after his fourteenth birthday, when he successfully identified a shipment of fire-touched hide by smell alone, correctly guessing not just the material but roughly which region of the Verdant Crown Forest it had likely come from — a small thing, but the merchant handling the shipment had been sufficiently impressed to slip him an extra copper and a rare, genuine compliment.

There was the evening, a year later, when he finally finished sounding out an entire guild posting on his own, start to finish, without help from the reading room clerk — a notice about a bounty on a pack of dire wolves troubling a nearby farming village, written in the same blunt, practical guild language he’d been slowly teaching himself to read for years. He remembered standing in front of that posting board for a long moment afterward, absurdly proud of himself, before realizing how strange he must have looked, grinning at a piece of paper.

There was the day he turned sixteen, and Bram — knee worse than ever, using a proper cane now instead of just favoring the leg — presented him, with gruff and slightly embarrassed ceremony, with an old traveling cloak that had belonged to Bram’s own son, the one who’d sailed off twelve years back and still wrote, occasionally, from ports Arlen had only heard about secondhand.

"Don’t need it anymore," Bram said gruffly, when Arlen tried to protest that it was too much. "Boy’s off making his own way in the world. Cloak’s just sitting in a chest doing nothing. Might as well go to someone who’ll actually use it."

Arlen wore that cloak on cold nights for the rest of that year, and every time he did, he thought about the shape of the life waiting for him — not just his own, but all the lives out there, unfolding in places he hadn’t seen yet, full of people he hadn’t met yet, doing things he couldn’t yet imagine.

By the time he turned seventeen, the strongbox beneath his floorboard held more coin than he’d ever dared hope for at eleven, the reading room clerk had long since given up pretending he wasn’t setting aside books specifically for Arlen, and the calluses on his hands told the story of six years of hauling, sorting, scrubbing, and saving, one small task at a time.

He wasn’t strong in the way adventurers were strong, not yet. He hadn’t held a real weapon in his life, hadn’t stepped one foot past the city wall except to gather firewood at its very edge. But he was patient in a way few seventeen-year-olds managed to be, and he understood — in the deep, settled way a person understands something they’ve spent years proving to themselves — that patience, carefully spent, was its own kind of strength.

One more year, he told himself, standing at the western gate one evening as the last caravan of the day rolled through, dust and noise and the wild, sharp smell of the forest trailing behind it.

One more year, and then he would finally walk through that gate himself.