V1C15

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It happened when I was five. One day, Dad didn’t come back. He’d said he was going out hunting, and that was the last I ever heard from him. But Dad loved me. I know there’s no way he abandoned me.

That means that… well, you know. It happens to adventurers.

In any case, it only took a few days after that for me to run out of food in the house. I was hungry, so for the first time in my life, I left town by myself. Dad had always told me I couldn’t. It was too dangerous. But my stomach’s incessant grumbling bowled over that.

I convinced myself it would work out somehow. I had been trained in the basics of adventuring, after all. Dad had showed me some good hunting spots, and he’d taught me how to capture slimes and take down shooting beans.

It was then, when I’d left the city and was heading toward the nearest shooting-beans hunting spot, that a good, sweet scent tickled my nose. Drawn by the scent, I found myself where I’d intended to go anyways—the field of shooting beans.

Specifically, I was drawn to one area near the field’s edge, and there, where somebody had hunted shooting beans some time ago, I found them.

Dad had shown them to me over and over to make sure I remembered them, saying, “You see these? Promise me that, no matter what, you won’t eat these. You only get four skills. That’s it. Four for your entire life. You can’t waste one on any of these.” He’d repeated the lesson so many times that I’d thought my ears might fall off.

If you guessed that I’d found some skill fruits dropped by shooting beans, you’re right. Those fruits piled up on the ground, each and every one of them, contained a useless trash skill. And that’s exactly why they’d been left there—nobody, not the original hunter nor any passerby, would go out of their way to collect a trash skill fruit. Everybody knows what they look like, and everybody knows that they’re useless.

But, at that moment, they smelled really, really good.

I lost to my empty stomach and plucked out the tastiest smelling one of the bunch.

And then I took just a little nibble.

“Mmmm!” My mouth was immediately filled with an invigorating sweet and sour taste. It was delicious, despite what Dad had heard about it being so bitter you couldn’t even eat it. There wasn’t even a hint of bitterness, as far as I could tell.

After that, I lost myself to eating and eating my fill of skill fruits. I didn’t care that they were trash skill fruits. What I cared about was that, by that point, it had been three days since I’d had anything to eat. And these, every last one of them, were more delicious than anything else I’d ever eaten. Some were sour. Some were sweet. Some were both. But all were amazing.

Eventually, I’d eaten so much that I could eat no more, and it was then that I realized what I’d done and knew I had to check my skills. Until that day, until that moment, my skills had been completely blank.

“Marmar, are you listening? The skills you get affect the kind of life you’ll lead. It’s important to choose them carefully. When you’re a bit older, and you know what kind of adult you want to be, I’m going to buy you a skill that’ll help you do that. Okay? Your dad’s going to work hard to save the money we need so you can get a good skill.”

That’s what Dad always used to say. He was always looking out for me and my happiness.

And now, in the spot that until that moment I’d made sure to keep blank… were four skills.

Improved Carrying Capacity

Evasion

Improved Critical Chance

Improved Critical Damage

Each one, I knew from Dad, was a trash skill. Especially Improved Carrying Capacity, which was, along with some skill called Tenacity, a skill whose actual effect was completely unknown. Neither seemed to have any effect at all, and many people treat them like a curse that just eats up one of your four skill slots.

I cried.

Dad had worked so hard to make sure I would have good skills, and I let my hunger ruin everything.

*****************

But that was only for a little while. I couldn’t take back what I’d done. I couldn’t change what had happened. There was no point crying over filled skills. And, importantly, there was no point not to eat these delicious fruits now.

A quick look around revealed that there were more abandoned skill fruits in the area than I could carry. I guess that’s about what you’d expect from a shooting-beans hunting ground. But I gave it my best shot and filled my bag to bursting, and I completely forgot that I’d come out here in the first place to actually hunt shooting beans.

Then I returned home and again dined on skill fruits that night. But, when I ended up biting into one that had no smell, I found myself spitting out bitter chunks, and, much like Tarō, desperately gulping down water to clear away the aftertaste.

Bravely, I experimented—biting into fruit after fruit, suffering through their bitterness and finding relief in their sweetness, to discover how to tell when they were good to eat. I found, eventually, that they were only good once they’d started giving off that pleasant smell.

At that point, they became ever so slightly softer, and some could even be peeled just with your fingers. But, most importantly, every type of skill fruit lost its bitterness and became sweet.

Starting that day and for the three years that followed, I went to that same hunting ground. At first, I did not hunt. I just picked up the fruits others had abandoned. Even at five years old, I could have taken down shooting beans, but there were just so many fruits to collect that I couldn’t even carry all of them without having anything extra to worry about.

That meant, of course, that for some time after I started living on my own, I ate exclusively skill fruits. Eating only the ones with the telltale smell, I stored the rest until they too ripened. Admittedly, it did get a bit boring, eating the exact same thing day after day, but I’m thankful. That boring diet kept five year-old me from starving to death.

After I grew up a little more and I could carry more at once, I also started hunting shooting beans. I turned that income trickle into meat skewers and bread, to round out my diet.

That’s also when I learned something important, because I could attach a date to the skill fruits I picked up from a monster I’d killed myself. I used some of my earnings to buy some cheap pots, and I stored my fruits in them based on the day they’d dropped. That taught me that it takes seven days, more or less, for one of these skill fruits to ripen.

*****************

From that point on, I keep my pots in order, and I make sure to eat the ones from the pot I filled seven days before.

This is a secret that only I know.

If other people knew that trash skill fruits are actually delicious, some idiots might hunt shooting beans to extinction trying to secure them. Can you imagine how dumb that would be if I couldn’t get them anymore?

But, of course, that’s not all. If they found out the fruits are delicious, they’d also eventually find out my other, more important secret.