Reborn to be a Hermit

Chapter 4: The Skills of a New Life

The air in the classroom was still heavy with the scent of cheap incense and crushed ambition. Rina stood before the Principal, holding the orb that had just shattered into a thousand glittering, useless fragments in her palm, yet her heart was a furious drumbeat of desperate triumph.

I have my power, she thought. And the system thinks I’m a joke.

She had selected an SSS-Rank skill, a power of world-shattering magnitude, yet its description was a cruel, minimalist insult: [Inch Blade] – A blade the size of an inch that could cut through anything. She was left with the chilling knowledge that a single-inch razor of pure energy was now fused into her Void Core, and she had absolutely no idea how to wield it effectively. In the face of a kingdom’s worth of corruption, betrayal, and murderous mages, she had a weapon smaller than a thumbnail.

Still, the gamble had paid off. She had rejected the Royal Academy by becoming unprofitable.

Edam stepped up to the table of shimmering, discarded Zero-Level Skill Orbs. His dark, guarded eyes flickered to the spot where Rina had stood, then swept over the remaining marbles. He was looking for the signal she’d taught him—the subtle black edge and orange glow that marked true, high-ranking power.

Then, he stopped. His hand bypassed a faintly glowing orb and settled on one that was dull gray, unremarkable, and radiating only a negligible, comforting warmth. It was the orb she had not instructed him to take, but the one she had hoped he would choose.

He crushed it without a word, the remnants flowing into his demon-tinged core. Rina knew what it was. It wasn't an SSS-Rank power, but it was their salvation: the Curse of the Barren Soul, a self-inflicted demon magic that would make his powerful core magically null and void—a necessary sacrifice to avoid becoming a longevity pill for the Eleventh Prince.

The Principal, Sir Borus, watched the second student deliberately ruin his life's prospects with a look of pure, defeated greed. He had lost his last hope of a bonus. The two most promising students in the village had not only rejected his authority but had openly mocked the system by choosing the "worthless" skills.

Then, an unexpected, terrifying thing happened.

Hedle, a mousy girl from the front row, a perennial teacher's pet and a slave to authority, stood up. Her eyes were wide, not with defiance, but with a strange, panicked desperation.

“Master Veridian! Principal Borus! I—I, too, will take a Zero-Level Skill!”

The entire room dissolved into chaos. Hedle was one of the few students who had always followed the rules. Her father was a minor official in the local district, a man who saw the Royal Academy as the sole path to elevating his family's status. Her sudden, public defiance was a catastrophe.

She can't be serious, Rina thought, her mind racing. The corruption is reaching deeper than I realized.

The Principal, pale with shock, lunged toward Hedle, a theatrical mask of concern plastered over his sheer terror of losing the girl’s father’s patronage.

"No, Hedle! Dear girl! You have been chosen for the Academy! You are going to receive a glorious life! These skills are useless! Look at Rina and Edam! They've destroyed their future!"

But Hedle was surprisingly resolute. She pointed a shaking finger at the table of skills. "I'll take the one Edam didn't want! The one with the faint glow!"

The Principal and the teachers, seeing the utter chaos this would unleash with her father, tried to physically restrain her. But Hedle, fueled by an unknown, sudden conviction, fought them off, seizing the small, faintly glowing orb Edam had bypassed.

She crushed it.

Rina watched, her internal calculator working overtime. Hedle had chosen the true SSS-Rank skill that Edam's focused panic had caused him to miss. The orb glowed briefly, a sharp, angry orange before dissolving.

[Divine Healing] Acquired.

It was the Divine Healing skill! Rina realized, the blood draining from her face. The ability to instantly cure any wound or disease, including death!

In her past life, this skill had surfaced ten years later, wielded by a charismatic, dangerous warlord who used his divine power to command absolute, religious devotion from his legions. It was a power that would change the trajectory of the Kingdom of Bohemia, a power that should have been hers to control.

But why did Hedle reject the Academy? Rina’s eyes narrowed, scanning the girl's face. Hedle wasn't triumphant; she looked utterly, profoundly terrified. She was reacting to a threat.

"The test, ma'am," Hedle whispered to the Principal, her voice thick with panic, "it showed I have a fatal disease. A disease with no cure. I'll take the skill. I must take the skill."

The Principal and the teachers exchanged looks of utter defeat. The Awakening not only revealed Talent but also the state of the student's physical and magical health. The system had just confirmed one of their 'talented' students was a dead woman walking.

It was a triple blow to the Academy. Three students gone. Two useless, one dying, and all three had bypassed the noble's harvest.

Rina seized the moment of bureaucratic collapse. "Sir, if we are to be outcasts, we might as well go home. My family needs me to assist with the harvest."

The Principal simply waved a hand, his face already contorted into the mask of a man crafting a spectacular lie for the local lord. "Go! All of you! Go home! I wash my hands of this disaster!"

---

The Test of Power

Outside the schoolhouse, in the sharp, clean light of the late afternoon, Rina pulled Edam away from the village center. Hedle fled in the opposite direction, clutching her newly acquired, devastating power like a drowning woman clinging to a spar of wood.

"We did it, Edam," Rina muttered, her voice low. "We bought ourselves time. Now, we must make your Curse work. You need to use your power until it’s fully drained. Completely nullified."

They arrived at the edge of the village, at the reeking, noxious sludge pit that marked the boundary between the living and the forgotten. Edam’s shack was situated here, in the damp, sewage-fed swamp, a testament to his mother's pariah status as an unwed mother and a demonkin.

Edam turned to her, his sharp, dark eyes burning with newfound fear and respect. "You said I needed to find a spell that would make my magic vanish. I couldn't find a text, but the skill I took... it's a Zero-Level spell of Decomposition."

Rina’s eyes widened. She had not had time to check the details of his chosen orb.

"What is the full description?" she demanded.

[Universal Decomposer] – A skill that decomposes any object or magical structure into its constituent parts.

Worse than I thought, Rina realized with a surge of cold awe. His innate demonkin magic was already powerful, focused on destruction and entropy. This skill, this Universal Decomposer, was the absolute, ultimate expression of that power. It was not a 'barren soul' curse; it was a tool of ultimate annihilation.

"It will drain your core faster than the curse," Rina stated, her voice trembling slightly. "It will make you magically bankrupt in hours, not weeks. We have to use it now. On the biggest, filthiest object you can find."

She gestured toward the putrid, stagnant pond that marked his yard—a sickening cocktail of village waste, mud, and ancient, festering corruption.

"Look at that pond," she commanded. "Release all your power. Decompose the rot. Decompose the toxins. Command it to break down, utterly and completely."

Edam nodded, his face a mask of grim determination. He closed his eyes, and the air around him grew strangely thick, vibrating with an unnatural frequency.

He unleashed the power.

The change was instantaneous and violent.

The surface of the black sludge pond erupted in a chaotic frenzy. The stench, already overwhelming, intensified ten-fold, turning into a sharp, acrid chemical tang that burned Rina’s nostrils. The water went from brown to sickly black, then boiled with an internal, silent intensity.

The reeds in the center of the swamp—sickly, thin grasses—began to swell, elongating at an impossible speed. They grew thicker, stronger, their stalks hardening into wood, their tips exploding into vast, leafy foliage that blocked the sun.

As the sludge was broken down—decomposed—the water turned miraculously clear. A carpet of dead, bloated frogs, tadpoles, and insect larvae floated to the surface, the casualties of the toxic cleansing. But the Decomposer skill didn’t stop there. The dead creatures themselves began to dissolve, breaking down into their elemental dust, leaving the pond’s surface momentarily sparkling clean.

Suddenly, an entire school of blind, pure-white fish, the Gnawers, surfaced from the muddy depths, swimming in the newly purified water.

Rina watched in numb fascination. The reeds had grown to the height of a two-story house, their growth fueled by the rapid decomposition of the centuries of filth below. She recognized them instantly: Elephant Reeds, a rare, demonic-continent plant whose fibers were used to create the strongest binding known to their world—Elephant Rope. And the fish? The Gnawers were the only creatures that could process the reeds, eating away the flesh to leave the powerful, diamond-hard fibers.

A completely self-sustaining, self-processing, immensely profitable magic factory, Rina thought, a single, manic smile splitting her face. A world-class resource created by the very power we sought to destroy.

Edam collapsed, gasping, his body trembling with exhaustion. His core was empty, completely, gloriously drained. He was magically bankrupt, and by all metrics of the Royal Academy, he was now useless.

But he had just created their future.

Rina looked at the towering Elephant Reeds, their gigantic leaves rustling in the breeze, and then at the white, blind Gnawer fish swarming below. She looked back at Edam, lying on the damp earth, exhausted but alive.

She had lost the Divine Healing skill, but she had secured a weapon—the Inch Blade—and an ultimate tool of production and wealth creation—the Universal Decomposer. The Void was filled with the blade, and her future was suddenly, terrifyingly, bright. The war was far from over, but the first two crucial steps—survival and resource acquisition—were complete. They were no longer targets; they were a self-sufficient, armed threat.

"Get up, Edam," Rina commanded, not unkindly. "You just earned us a life beyond the Kingdom's reach."