TRAMP, TRAMP.
Three corpses walk side by side down the forest path. Their motions are so natural that from a distance no one would ever imagine they were already dead corpses.
Beside them walk an old man and a girl. In the girl's arms a spider is held.
Only when that bizarre party stepped into the inner courtyard of a certain residence at the edge of the forest do the walking corpses collapse in a heap, like puppets with their strings cut.
So it was written on the signboard hung at the residence's entrance.
***
"Is there a face among these that you know, Village Chief?"
"...They are all men I have never seen before. Surely they were vagrants drifting about here and there. Please do not trouble yourself. This humble one will handle it all, so that Elder Physician Gok need not concern himself over it."
The middle-aged village chief bowed his head over and over to the hunchbacked old man, fawning on him.
Beside them three corpses lay side by side, their skin stained purple, as though they had been done in by poison, an ugly sight.
In any case, the able-bodied men who had come with the village chief soon made ready to carry the corpses. Right up until he left, the village chief kept watching the hunchbacked old man's mood and flattering him. Meanwhile he also raised his voice at the men.
"You louts! Can you not get to work smartly? At this rate the sun will set on us."
Then a peculiar creature suddenly came into the village chief's view. It was the pitch-black spider that had been staring this way from a corner of the clinic's courtyard all this while. Its bulk was that of a decent dog, so that if it lunged at a man, even a sturdy young fellow looked unlikely to withstand it.
In a word, it was frightening. The village chief pointed at the spider rather cautiously and asked the old man Gok.
"Th-that aside, Elder. What might that pitch-black spider over there be?"
At the village chief's question the old man turned his head slightly toward the spider. Looking at the spider with something like a blank expression, the old man Gok let a nonchalant reply fall from his mouth.
"Ah. That is the spider Ran keeps."
"Ah, a pet spider.... I understand."
Ordinarily he had never so much as heard of anyone keeping a spider as a pet, and moreover keeping a spider that huge was nonsense however one thought about it, but the village chief did not dare think of arguing and only fawned.
Only after the village chief and the men had shouldered the corpses and left the clinic did the old man Gok, left alone, sit down on the edge of the wooden veranda and sink into thought. The old man's gaze looks past the veranda, at the door of the room.
Beyond that door the girl—Yu Ran—is asleep. The earlier affair must have been such a shock that she fell asleep as soon as she reached the house. In the meantime the old man Gok had sent word to the village, and the village chief, on receiving it, had come in person to take the corpses away.
In any case, this counted as one worry lifted for the old man Gok as well.
Earlier, when Ran had come to him weeping that she had been attacked, the old man Gok's heart had sunk inwardly. He had feared that they might be assassins sent by the Yeon family.
But the attackers' identities turned out to be ordinary vagrants, and absurdly enough they had already all been killed by a spider cursed fiend.
When his thoughts reached that point, the old man's gaze turned toward the spider again.
The spider had been sitting quietly in a corner of the courtyard all this while, looking around here and there, and it was quite an uncanny creature.
The thing had stayed in Ran's arms until she fell asleep, like a clever dog that reads a person's mood, and only after Ran had fallen asleep had it slipped quietly out and gone to sit over there.
Presently the old man Gok picked himself up and headed for the storehouse. He had to finish the work he had been doing earlier in the day.
After the old man went into the storehouse, only the spider was left in the courtyard. The spider stayed there vacantly a while, rolling its eight eyeballs round and round, then suddenly slipped in under the main veranda and quietly fell asleep.
***
And so the spider came to live at the Gok Family Clinic.
During that time Yu Ran gave the spider the name 'Black Spider,' which meant just what it said, a spider that was black.
In any case, Black Spider always went about together with Yu Ran. Whether she was going to dig herbs or running the old man Gok's errands in the village, she always carried it slung on her back, and because of that a village woman would sometimes be startled at the sight and drop her eggs, and other such commotions arose.
But even such a bizarre sight was something everyone got used to as time passed, and such incidents stopped happening. If anything, the neighborhood children found it wondrous that a huge spider was as docile as a dog, and came up to show interest and even play with it.
Thanks to that, Black Spider's language interpretation ability shot up sharply as well.
Before this, Black Spider had already once snuck into this village in secret and observed how the humans lived. But at that time it had not been able to approach the humans this closely.
The most it had managed was to hide itself behind undergrowth or rocks, or in the dark corner of a storehouse, and analyze distant voices by relying on its divine awareness.
But now the humans came up to it first and chattered away at its side, so Black Spider could obtain linguistic information just by sitting still.
The village children in particular went wild with delight when Black Spider seemed to understand what they said, and were desperate to get it to respond to them somehow.
By nature language is learned fastest through conversation.
Black Spider adapted in an instant to the children's simple and blunt vocabulary directed at it, and before long it came to understand most of the words the children uttered.
Understanding through that the framework of the sentence structures humans employed was a bonus.
Once the channel of interpretation had been opened that way, Black Spider's language ability all but exploded, so that later on it could answer simple questions by wagging a leg or shaking its head.
In any case, this manner of living was not at all bad for Black Spider either. Though it could not hunt cursed beasts and obtain cursed energy, it was an opportunity to study human society in greater detail.
Black Spider was also quite interested in the work the old man Gok did. Black Spider, now able to make out most ordinary conversation, understood as well that the old man Gok was the only physician in this whole area.
Whenever there was an injured or sick patient in the village, everyone came to the Gok Family Clinic. Then the old man Gok would blend medicinal herbs and the like and prescribe them to the patient, or sometimes apply needles.
But the treatment Black Spider watched with the greatest interest was the treatment of external injuries.
On the rare occasions when a patient came with a bone broken or wrenched or dislocated, the old man Gok would set the broken bone and fit it back into place with his bare hands or using tools, and his skill at it was no small thing.
According to what Black Spider observed, the old man Gok's understanding of the human body was simply immense.
He seemed to guess the shape of the bones and flesh inside without even needing to cut the skin open and look, and at times he seemed to stimulate the meridians using needles.
Probably that puppet art of his, natural beyond compare, had arisen from such an overwhelming understanding of the body.
The old man Gok, however, had not used his puppet arts even once in front of others since that time he transported the corpses. It even looked as though he were hiding the technique from other people.
It was a strange thing, but it was not for Black Spider to question it, so there was nothing to be done.
Only, from time to time the old man Gok would take out the puppets stored in the storehouse and inspect them meticulously and move them a little, and those puppets, crude in form though they were, had many joints and were supple, structured so that they could imitate human movement exactly.
The puppets each had a different build: an adult man, an adult woman, a boy, a girl, and one hunchback puppet that resembled the old man Gok himself, five in all.
Of them, the one the old man Gok handled most attentively was the puppet that resembled himself, and whenever the old man Gok handled that puppet, Black Spider was without fail sitting beside him, rolling its eyeballs round and round.
In any case, the clinic's peaceful daily life simply flows on.
Whenever the old man Gok exercised his medical arts, Yu Ran would always assist at his side.
In fact it was thanks to that that Black Spider had been able to watch the old man Gok's medical arts all this while.
As Black Spider saw it, the old man Gok seemed to be raising Yu Ran as his successor as physician.
At times, in the middle of treatment, the old man Gok would question Yu Ran about a simple symptom or the like, and when Yu Ran got the answer right he would show an inwardly satisfied look.
Of course, Yu Ran was still young and unpracticed. For her to become a proper physician would take at least several more years, and both the old man Gok and Yu Ran herself knew that well.
The one who showed talent for the clinic's work was, absurdly enough, Black Spider.
One day Yu Ran was blending and grinding a medicine on the old man Gok's instructions, and by mistake she left out one of the ingredients.
But Black Spider, beside her, saw this and quietly fetched the ingredient and set it down beside her, right where she could not miss it.
And the amount was, astoundingly, exactly the right amount.
So when Yu Ran informed the old man Gok that such a thing had happened, even the old man Gok seemed a little astonished.
In fact the old man Gok already understood that Black Spider was no ordinary cursed beast. In the world the old man had once belonged to there were many strange folk who had mastered all manner of bizarre techniques, and among them there were no few strange folk who raised and commanded cursed beasts.
They controlled cursed beasts by means of special compound medicines and repeated instruction, and yet that pitch-black spider had never received such instruction and still understood human speech perfectly and obeyed well.
Still less that a mere beast should understand medicine blending and know how to get the exact measure right.
Had he only heard it by rumor, he would have dismissed it as an idle tale, but since it had happened in his own inner room he could hardly disbelieve it.
So the next day the old man Gok actually took Black Spider aside and ran a light verification. As though giving Yu Ran an examination, he recited a patient's symptoms and then told it to blend the exact measure of medicine for three days' dosage.
At that Black Spider went scurrying about, gathering the ingredients and collecting them in a bowl. Then it calmly crushed the ingredients using its forelegs, and astonishingly, its strength was such that juice came out of even the well-dried ingredients.
When it then bound the crushed ingredients together and hardened them with a binding fluid to form pills, the finished product was beyond reproach even in the old man Gok's eyes.
"...Good heavens."
It was bizarre, and bizarre again. But it was not a bad thing. The old man Gok knows by now that he has grown old. He had been born a hunchback to begin with, with a body frailer than other men's.
For the remainder of his life he would protect Ran himself, but what came after that had always weighed on his mind.
Yet as he watched Black Spider, that unease seemed to fade to some degree.
If a cursed beast of that caliber stayed at Ran's side, then there would be no more occasions in the future when some riffraff harmed Ran, as had happened the other day.
But the old man's hopes soon collapsed to nothing.
That was to be expected, since his had been a life lived with blood on his hands from beginning to end.
How heavy the karma of the sins he had piled up that way might be, the old man could not even guess himself.
Only, when misfortune came, he simply resigns himself, thinking that this is the retribution allotted to him.
There was an attack.
On a dark night with the last crescent moon risen.
Ten-odd assassins, three of them first-rate assassins, attacked the Gok Family Clinic.
The old man Gok took the five combat puppets from the storehouse and put up a fight with his puppet arts, but in the end he was driven back and forth by the assassins' combined assault and was finally stabbed through the chest.
Yu Ran, who had been hiding in her room, ran out weeping the instant the old man Gok was stabbed through the chest by a blade and threw herself at the assassins.
Naturally it was meaningless.
When one of the assassins struck the back of Yu Ran's neck lightly, Yu Ran lost consciousness and collapsed on the spot. Slinging the fallen Yu Ran over a shoulder, the assassins soon vanished from sight.
And in that place, where after everyone had gone only silence had settled.
Suddenly, a spider that had been hiding under the main veranda all this while crept out.
That spider was none other than Black Spider.
In the darkness Black Spider rolled its eyeballs round and round and then discovered the fallen old man Gok.
The blade had already pierced his heart, and he had expired.
In this state, no matter what spiritual medicine one brought, he could not be saved. Black Spider understands that there is nothing at all it can do for the old man.
Instead Black Spider retraces the battle between the humans that it had just witnessed.
A battle between humans in which not the slightest cursed energy could be felt.
And yet, from what Black Spider felt, it had been as though great cursed fiends were locked in a dragon-and-tiger struggle.
The humans seemed to wield a power different in kind from that of cursed fiends, and its force seemed not to fall short even measured against the jade-hued hawk.
In particular, the old man Gok, who had fought on alone handling five puppets, had seemed at the last moment to burst all the energy in his body in his resistance, just as the mother weasel had done that time, and the sight of him fighting while handling puppets freely at will left a great impression on Black Spider.
In any case, Black Spider's eyeballs roll round and round, searching for something. Then its gaze reaches a certain object and stops.
Where Black Spider's gaze fell there was one puppet. At a scene where everything had been smashed to a grisly ruin, so that what remained could in effect only be called fragments, one single puppet had been left comparatively sound.
That puppet was none other than the hunchback puppet. Since it was the article the old man Gok had cherished most, its performance had been outstanding as well, and thanks to that it still held its form even after that fierce battle.
Its built-in weapons had all been spent, and all that remained was the body, but even so, this much was no small thing.
Black Spider's eyeballs roll round and round. A few strands of thread are fired from its rear and stick fast to the hunchback puppet.
Holding the puppet with its silk that way, Black Spider slipped quietly out of the Gok Family Clinic. Rolling its eyeballs round and round, it gauged the direction, and then vanished from sight to the west, in the direction of the mountain range.
And so, by the time day broke the next morning, all that remained at the Gok Family Clinic was the corpse of one shabby old man, the puppets smashed to utter ruin, and a scraped trail as though some corpse or other had been dragged away.