I Am A Table [LitRPG Isekai Progression Fantasy]

Another quill zipped overhead and exploded into footnotes.

Blorbo stared upward. He could still do this. He just needed to stay calm. Breathe. Or simulate breathing. Find one single quill that wasn't sentient enough to understand what was about to happen, but still sentient enough to qualify for the quest.

He narrowed his awareness. Tabled his panic.

Then—flutter flutter—there it was.

A lonely quill. Not flying. Not flailing. Just... lofting. Like it had no idea what was going on. It drifted lazily toward him, doing little feather-spins in the air.

"Yes," he whispered. "YES. COME TO YOUR WOODEN DESTINY."

[Skill Activated: Consume]

Just as the quill touched his surface—

BOOM.

[- 5 HP]

A puff of pink confetti blasted out of his tabletop. It smelled like cinnamon gum and fireworks.

WHAT. WHAT WAS THAT.

[The Invitation Partially Exploded. May Explode Again.]

"Dear Lord!" someone that sounded like Marin shouted. "Did Blorbo just detonate?"

The quill, startled, flapped twice and veered off into a sconce, catching fire instantly.

NOOOO! He screamed, wood vibrating with fury. YOU GLITTER-INFUSED CURSE OF A CARD! YOU BLEW UP MY DESTINY!

[Status Effect Gained: Mildly Frosted]

[+15% Charm with Sentient Pastries. -10% Seriousness in Academic Settings.]

What? What is this? This is irrelevant!

A series of frantic footsteps approached. Marin skidded into view, covered in ash and carrying a taxidermied pineapple.

"Lena, careful!" he barked. "Sentient pastries incoming! They're enchanted with socialization!"

But Lena, stalwart as ever, gasped in horror. "Oh no! I didn't bring any bags!"

Her eyes went wide. Determined. Unhinged.

She tilted her head back and began scooping air with her mouth wide open, flailing her arms like flippers.

She's trying to… eat?

It was working.

The sugar-swirled air whipped into a frenzy as croissants with eyes, argumentative éclairs, and extremely judgmental danishes spiraled in toward Lena, and by extension, Blorbo. The 15% Charm was charming them this way!

A sticky cinnamon roll clipped Marin on the shoulder, bounced off a desk, and slammed directly into Blorbo's lid.

Splat.

A single quill—jammed diagonally into a lemon tart—now quivered atop Blorbo's surface, sticky with syrup and dignity.

Wait. Wait. It's helping. THIS IS ACTUALLY HELPING.

He focused. Centered his aura.

[Skill Activated: Consume]

This is it. The quill is stuck. It can't go anywhere.

[ERROR: Too Many Items. Please Consume One at a Time. Choking Hazard Detected.]

Would You Like to Enable Chew Protocol?

Yes/No

WHAT?! NO! I DON'T EVEN HAVE TEETH!

But since the system had so kindly asked, he picked Yes.

[Denied: You don't have teeth.]

CURSE YOU, YOU STUPID LINE OF CODE!

The lemon tart began to hum ominously.

[WARNING: Pastry Has Reached Singing Phase. Flee Or Join Chorus.]

He consumed the lemon tart.

Fine! I'll do it one at a time!

42 tarts later…

I… I can't… No more.

Blorbo shuddered.

43 tarts deep.

His grain was sweating. His internal compartments ached with fullness. A bloated groan echoed from somewhere inside his drawerspace.

Where… where were these things going?

[Skill: Consume] didn't specify. It never had. He had assumed—blessedly assumed—it was like a void. A pocket realm. A clean deletion protocol. But now?

Now he felt full. Not spiritually. Not emotionally. Physically.

Like someone had stuffed his metaphorical gut with frosted anxiety and weaponized sugar.

He listed slightly to one side. Was that… cramping?

[New Status Effect: Artificial Satiety]
[-30% Agility | +40% Existential Confusion]
[You are now considered a Hostile Sugar-Rich Entity by Antidietary Constructs]

Blorbo wheezed. I think I'm crashing. I feel like a piñata at a tax seminar.

He wanted to puke.

Could he puke?

Did he have a "Regurgitate" function?!

He tried puking. Nope.

Now, there was only one left to consume. The quill.

It protruded proudly from the lemon tart's grave like a cursed relic from a pastry battlefield

He reached for it, trembling. Not with fear. With bloat.

He activated [Skill: Consume].

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

A long pause.

Nothing happened.

The quill just sat there.

He focused harder, forcing the skill like someone trying to sneeze by staring directly at a lightbulb.

[Skill: Consume] — Error: Repeated Consumption has Temporarily Overloaded Digestive Abstraction Layer

WHAT?!

He staggered, or tried to. Mostly he just bobbed like a capsized filing cabinet. Every movement sloshed. His entire body made the sound of a bag of pudding being juggled.

Blorbo sobbed, or made a noise spiritually adjacent to sobbing.

Then, finally—

fwip

The quill was gone. Vanished. He didn't even know when it happened.

[Skill: Consume] has learned discretion and has ignored moderation.

Note: You will feel REALLY bad. Probably stunned for 50 days.

Stunned for HOW MANY days?

[SIDEQUEST COMPLETED: Consume a Sentient Quill]
Reward:
— +5 HP
— +5 CP
— Rare Skill Unlocked: Arcane Knowledge

Eh, who cares? Let's get the gains first. I can deal with the fallout later.

Let's see how good this amazingly named Arcane Knowledge is. Worst it can do is being useless.

The reward screen faded. A new window hovered politely, trimmed in glowing gold.

[Skill Unlocked: Arcane Knowledge (Rank I)]
Know all that man was not meant to know. Know it anyway. Know it so hard it hurts.

That was a weird tooltip.

A second window opened.

Warning: Arcane Knowledge is incompatible with your current operating framework. Cognitive spiraling may occur.

Third window.

You have been inflicted with:
— Existential Vertigo
— Linguistic Synesthesia
— Forbidden Vocabulary Tourette's
— Recursive Thought Loops (unstable)
— Loose Socket Awareness

Blorbo felt… itchy. Not on his surface. No, the itch was somewhere deep in the grain, like termites of comprehension gnawing through walls of reality.

He knew things.

He knew the square root of disappointment.

He knew where socks went when eaten by laundry machines.

He knew the mating ritual of metaphors.

He could hear colors, and worse, they were off-key.

He thought: I am thinking that I am thinking about thinking that I am—

[Loop detected. Attempting to patch with Error Poetry.]

Suddenly, Blorbo began chanting.

"The fish of knowledge bites its own tale,
My drawers are screaming, 'I AM THE MAIL.'
Twelve truths walked into a bar and exploded.

The punchline never made it."

He slapped himself with a drawer. That didn't help. Mostly because he didn't have arms.

Then—

[You have unlocked: Forbidden Vocabulary Tourette's (Passive)]

He screamed, Eldritch pretzel doctrine of the seventh upholstery spiral!

No! Please—Quasar-sucking lintlord of the mezzanine void!—Stop this. Please—SWEET PICKLED DEMIGODS ON A TRAMPOLINE OF REGRET!—Disable! Disable it!

[Arcane Knowledge Disabled. You are now back to being an idiot.]

Blorbo seethed, coped, malded. That was it? That was Arcane Knowledge?

No spell list. No cool UI widget. Not even a passive boost to Intellect or Lore or Pretentiousness. Just trauma.

The buttock-harlot system didn't even give him a proper description of the skill. He would have to make sure to never accidentally enable it again, especially NOT during, hypothetically, a dangerous life-and-death situation where he would have to fight an army of airborne chickens (which was definitely not going to happen!).

[CONGRATULATIONS: You received 'Sugar Crash'!]

Wait. What—

[Effect applied: Stunned for 13 hours.]

Great.