And so Black Spider returned to the mountain range.
It found a suitable cave in the area just below the ridge and made its nest there.
From here it would be easy to set out over the range to hunt cursed beasts, and since it was high up, humans would not be able to come here so easily either. It was a fitting location in many respects.
By now Black Spider understood how terrifying beings humans were.
Humans were high in intelligence, they formed groups, and some individuals even possessed strength enough to be compared with cursed fiends. Creatures like that even moved about together in packs.
That is, they were dangerous.
That Black Spider had been able to blend into human society until now was entirely thanks to the old man Gok and Yu Ran, so from now on, with them gone, it was wise not to make careless contact with humans.
CLATTER, CLUNK.
It carefully sets down the hunchback puppet it had brought in a corner of the nest and examines it. Since it was a puppet modeled on the human body, it was far larger than Black Spider itself.
In any case, this puppet was the greatest harvest it had gained this time. The sight of the old man Gok fighting with this puppet still remained vividly in Black Spider's mind.
But Black Spider had no sense of how on earth it was supposed to control this marionette.
Of course, it had watched from beside him all this while as the old man Gok handled his puppets, but merely watching and handling it oneself were matters of an entirely different order.
To begin with, this marionette was an article manufactured on the assumption that a human would use it. That is to say, it had not been made for a small spider cursed fiend to handle.
So for the moment even making this large puppet stand up straight was more than Black Spider could manage.
Still, it quietly tries moving the puppet.
Imitating exactly what the old man Gok had done, it connects threads to the puppet's limbs and torso, then hangs upside down from the cave ceiling and pulls, slowly trying to raise it upright.
It is not easy.
What had moved so naturally at a mere flick of the old man Gok's hand does not go as intended in a single respect now that it is trying to handle it. Because there were so many joints and they were so supple, even a slight deviation in the angle of force made the thing wobble and sway unsteadily.
That was not all.
It had clearly connected the threads to the same parts the old man Gok had connected them to, and yet something was slapdash and crude about it, so that it could not even transmit force to the puppet properly. It felt as though something were wrong.
In the end, judging that this would not do, Black Spider came down from the ceiling. Along with it, the puppet it had gone to such trouble to stand up collapses as though caving in.
It examines the fallen puppet closely again. Black Spider's eyeballs roll round and round. Could it be that the puppet is broken?
That does not seem to be it. At least judging by the exterior, there were sword marks and nicks here and there, but no part looked particularly broken or out of alignment. Whatever the material was, it was tremendously hard.
So it hangs from the ceiling and tries raising the puppet again, but it merely flops about exactly as before.
In the end Black Spider gave up on standing the puppet upright. It leaves the thing sprawled on the floor and thinks as it stares at it quietly.
There is an order to all things, so if one cannot stand and walk, then one should first at least lie down and crawl.
And so, leaving the puppet lying there, it connects threads to each part alone. Through the connected threads it also links its divine awareness.
Now the puppet's movements are realized three-dimensionally in its mind's eye too. It will move them minutely this way and that, and find out what the cause of the problem is.
And so Black Spider's new daily life began.
All day long it grapples with the puppet.
Then when it gets hungry it goes out to hunt.
Once it has filled its belly it returns to the nest and studies the puppet.
Then when it tires it sleeps. It wakes again and studies the puppet.
Even so, progress was slow. An experience like this was a first for Black Spider as well.
In learning and mastering anything until now, Black Spider had always shown extraordinary talent. It had mastered human language fluently in a mere few months, and as for blending medicines, it did not forget anything it had heard once and could combine it precisely.
Even so, handling the puppet alone felt as though it ran along a different track. It felt as though it were floundering because it had left out some crucial concept.
Even exercising its divine awareness to cognize every trivial motion of the puppet one by one and striving at it did not resolve matters. What is it? What is the problem?
It deliberates. Even though there is no progress at all, Black Spider is not in the least impatient. Tenacity and persistence. It is a nature a spider is endowed with by birth.
There is no boredom in that gaze. If anything, the eight eyeballs merely glisten always with curiosity.
Black Spider retraces its memories. From the time it first met the old man Gok until he was killed by the assassins afterward, it retraces every one of those moments again.
Naturally the most vivid memory is the old man Gok's final moment. At that time the old man Gok had radiated an unknown, formless energy from his whole body, as though burning his own primordial true energy.
That power.
It was neither cursed energy nor divine awareness, a power of unknown identity that even Black Spider's sensing ability could recognize only faintly.
Perhaps that power was the very key condition for handling a puppet.
In that case, what on earth was that power?
It does not know. If it knew, it would not be sitting here like this. Black Spider sorts out the direction of its deliberation again. It decides to retrace things from the very beginning, from the root.
SHFF, SHF, SHF!
It drew a great deal of silk from its rear and then applied it to the puppet in thick layers. Until now Black Spider had tried to handle the puppet using only the eight strands the old man Gok had used, and had ended up failing.
In that case, it might be more efficient to use more strands and first move the puppet even by brute force, gradually adapting and then peeling away the unnecessary strands.
And so it tries controlling the puppet, by brute force at least, with a total of one hundred and eight strands of thread. The motion was neither natural nor anything but stiff, but at last the puppet stands up straight.
For now, at least, it counted as a success in getting the thing raised somehow.
***
And then a few months passed. The autumn wind turned chill, and then the cold winds of winter came blowing in. And around the time a warm spring breeze blew once more over the frozen mountain range and the stream that had been frozen all winter began to trickle again.
CLANK, CLANK!
Inside the gloomy cave such bizarre sounds were ringing out mechanically.
CLACK, CLACK, CLACK!
A bizarre object that seemed to resemble a human with a bent back is swinging its arms and legs all on its own, dancing a strange dance.
Looking closely, there were times when transparent, silver-glinting fine threads could be glimpsed sparkling in the air each time it danced. Those glittering threads numbered seventy-two in all.
Its identity was none other than the hunchback puppet that Black Spider controlled. What it had barely been able to move with one hundred and eight strands of thread it could now move that naturally with only seventy-two strands.
The effort it had put in all this while had not been in vain, and now Black Spider could handle the puppet fairly naturally.
It could even stand the puppet upright now without hanging from the ceiling, and this was thanks to understanding the flow of force—that is, the principle of force.
If one pushes from below while pulling from above, an object rotates upward.
Conversely, if one pushes from above while pulling from below, an object rotates downward.
Then what happens if one pushes and pulls from below, and also pulls and pushes from above?
It comes to stand upright. This was the same as the principle of stillness and motion, motion and stillness.
This was a principle that applied identically from any direction, above, below, left or right, and the crux was to divide the time over which force was applied into fine increments and to keep the balance between the opposing forces of pushing and pulling.
Only by handling it that delicately, adjusting the pace constantly, could one at last move the puppet naturally.
But that was all, as yet. To reach the divine skill of the old man Gok, who had handled the puppet freely at will with a mere eight strands of thread, it still had a long way to go.
The old man Gok had even handled four other puppets simultaneously on top of that.
Come to think of it, that was only natural. The old man Gok had been a remarkably outstanding special individual even among humans. That wondrous puppet art must have been the result of such a special human polishing himself for a lifetime, so for Black Spider, which had only played with a puppet for a few months, to seek the same result was presumptuous, one might say.
In any case, Black Spider had by now gained some grasp of how to handle the puppet.
This strange puppet, contrary to its crude exterior, possessed an exceedingly intricate and complex system.
If it were merely a matter of making it perform motions, it would be enough to stick threads all over its body and swing them about.
But to control the puppet with a small number of strands as the old man Gok had, a special art was required.
It holds force within. This is force accumulation.
It spits force out. This is force release.
Force accumulation and force release were not concepts that stopped at vaguely using thread as a vessel of transmission to convey force from this side to the puppet on that side.
When the force conveyed through the thread is transmitted to the puppet's body, that is force accumulation.
If the body that has thus accumulated force comes to function as another vessel of transmission, conveying force to other parts of the body to which no thread is connected and exerting its influence there, that is force release.
And controlling this flow of force was the very essence of puppet arts.
Only, since fine thread had been made the vessel of transmission, there was a limit to the magnitude of force that could be conveyed, and a separate technique was needed to make up for that.
Presumably, the old man Gok had used that formless energy to raise his transmitting power as much as was needed.
But since Black Spider could not handle that formless energy, it tried substituting cursed energy for it.
Using thread steeped in cursed energy, it accumulates force more strongly and releases force more distinctly. It senses that whole process through its divine awareness and weighs the increase and decrease of force in real time.
Do that, and this is the result.
CRAAACK!
The puppet's sharp hand-blade, swung nimbly, splits a stalactite in the cave in two. It is an attack that cannot be performed with a spider's flesh.
What material made up the puppet's body was unknown, but its solidity was greater than that of hard rock, and accordingly, so long as force accumulation and force release were achieved at a suitable level, that force could be used to carry out such destructive acts.
It was not that it had worked any separate cursed art; it was purely an expression of physical force using cursed power. Even so, it was a force against which any ordinary cursed fiend would be no match at all.
But Black Spider is not satisfied. It could not be otherwise. Had it never witnessed the old man Gok's wondrous divine skill it might be one thing, but it had already seen it clearly with its own eyes.
The far-off destination it must reach glitters loftily up there in that high, high place. Black Spider's eyeballs roll round and round as they look up at it.
It is a goal it cannot reach right now. In that case, it need only lower the goal a little and climb step by step.
Then what would be worth setting as the next goal?
Black Spider's eyeballs retrace the past. It calls to mind the most wretched moment that remains in its memory.
The enormous jade-hued hawk appeared. The sight of itself being helplessly dug open by that sharp beak came to mind.
Could that beak actually pierce even this puppet?
***
Now it became full spring and the greenery turned deep, and then more time passed still and it became summer with the sun blazing down.
And when a few summer downpours had come pouring through and clear autumn had arrived.
Suddenly, from inside a certain cave below the ridge, a pitch-black spider and a strange marionette came clunking out on foot.
That spider rolls its eight eyeballs round and round as it gazes past the ridge, at the land where the huge black peak rises up.
Naturally, that spider's identity was Black Spider.
Thanks to a year of tenacious training, Black Spider could now control the puppet with a mere thirty-six strands of thread.
That was not all.
Thanks to using its divine awareness steadily in controlling the puppet, Black Spider's divine awareness had become more than twice as large and dense as before, so that now, if it set its mind to spreading it out, it could feel out one hundred fifty feet ahead without laying down any separate silk.
And so, if it rotated the divine awareness it stretched out once around its brain stem as the center, it was possible to search a circular area with a radius of one hundred fifty feet in a single instant.
That is to say, it had sufficiently equipped itself with both combat power and searching ability.
Black Spider crosses the ridge. Even ordinarily, whenever it grew hungry it would readily cross over this way and eat petty cursed beasts.
But today was a little different.
Black Spider descends the mountain range. Instead of stopping at a suitable place as it usually did, it keeps going down.
As it descends that way it gazes at the huge black peak towering far off. Of the eight peaks of the Eight Peaks Forest, Due East Peak stands there.
At last Black Spider had returned to the Eight Peaks Forest.