One day the jade-hued hawk of the east suddenly vanished without a trace. This was a great affair, the disappearance of one of the four great cursed fiends of the Eight Peaks Forest.
The first to cognize this anomaly were the other three great cursed fiends, who had been the jade-hued hawk's rivals.
The boar of the west, the monkey of the north, the white serpent of the south.
They watched one another's reactions for a while, and then.
First of all the white serpent of the south quietly trespassed into the jade-hued hawk's territory.
After that the boar of the west hurriedly followed.
And the suspicious monkey of the north plunged in last of all.
Even while those three cursed fiends trespassed into the territory and ran wild, the jade-hued hawk never once showed herself, since in reality she had already been eaten by an ink-black spider in some dark cave and had long since been digesting in its belly.
And so, while the three cursed fiends ran wild, autumn passed and winter came and spring arrived once more.
While the seasons turned and the years turned and time flowed on that way.
One day.
Deep inside the forest, in a deep rock cave in what had originally been the jade-hued hawk's territory, an immense divine awareness suddenly stretched out.
That divine awareness seemed to sweep up and sense some three hundred feet of the surrounding area in a single stroke, and then vanished.
Afterward, from inside the rock cave the divine awareness had stretched out of, some huge, blackish form slowly showed itself.
It was an enormous ink-black spider. Its size alone was greater than any common ox, so that it would simply tear apart most land beasts.
Reason glinted in its eight black eyeballs, and its keen senses cognized the information of surrounding objects as though swallowing it.
This enormous spider, Black Spider, breathes.
Thanks to its enlarged body, even its physical volume of breath had increased. The thick spiritual energy of the forest depths seeps into its body through its breathing.
It tries moving its body with a smooth slide. Even though it had become a massive body, its motions had if anything grown more agile and precise than before, and perhaps this was because it had imitated the disciplined motion of the puppet arts the old man Gok had unfolded.
In any case, Black Spider now realizes that it has become a powerful cursed fiend on a level equivalent to the jade-hued hawk.
Since it had not yet absorbed the jade-hued hawk's cursed core held in its belly, it was hard to call itself entirely her equal, but it had already hunted down the jade-hued hawk using the puppet back when its weight class fell far short.
So now that it had come to possess the weight class as well, it would not be wrong to say there was no beast in this forest that could dare do it any harm.
***
The eastern district of the forest, once the jade-hued hawk's territory.
In that forest whose master had vanished, one day a mighty cursed fiend showed itself.
A pitch-black body with eight sharp legs. It was an enormous spider cursed fiend with eight blackly glinting eyeballs.
The various petty cursed fiends that had been expanding their own territories in the gap left by the jade-hued hawk's absence were the first to cognize its presence, and they immediately left their places on instinct.
By nature cursed beasts have the habit of gathering cursed energy inside their bodies in order to hide their own presence, but in a place where they have no natural predator, they do not bother and instead conduct themselves at ease.
Once the jade-hued hawk had behaved that way, and now that spider is behaving that way.
It was proof that it clearly knew itself to be the master of this district, and it was also an act of impressing its existence upon the beasts of this district.
In any case, such an act had the effect of driving off cursed fiends of a lower order, but against cursed fiends of an equal order it produced the opposite effect.
The first to show interest in this new great cursed fiend's appearance was the monkey of the north.
One day the monkey was, as usual, calmly trespassing into the eastern district and hunting prey. Then it suddenly felt a mighty cursed energy nearby and approached in secret.
There an enormous spider stood.
So the monkey, half out of curiosity and half by way of testing the other, picked up a large boulder and hurled it straight at the spider.
CLANG!
The force of a boulder thrown by the monkey cursed fiend was enough to reduce any ordinary cursed beast to pulp in a single blow.
Even so, the spider cursed fiend merely remained calm without any particular movement, and what moved instead was the monkey figure that had been standing vacantly nearby.
Silver-glinting lines seemed to flicker for an instant between the spider and the monkey figure, and then the monkey figure moved in a flash and batted away the boulder the monkey cursed fiend had thrown.
Immediately after that, an immense divine awareness swept once in a circle over the area and detected the monkey cursed fiend hiding among the trees at a stroke.
And the next moment, the spider's eight eyeballs rolled round and round and met the monkey cursed fiend's gaze.
The instant it met that gaze, the monkey cursed fiend sensed at once that it had chosen the wrong opponent.
Judging by the momentum of the cursed energy felt from the spider right then, the monkey itself was clearly superior, and yet looking at this terrifying divine awareness, all of that seemed to be an illusion.
So the monkey swiftly withdrew and fled. After that it never again attacked the spider carelessly, and it did not trespass into the eastern district, as though acknowledging its territory.
In fact it was extremely rare for powerful cursed fiends like the monkey and the spider to fight one another with their lives at stake.
That was to be expected, since they each had much to lose while having no certainty that they could definitely hunt the other down.
Powerful cursed fiends like these possessed not only strength but excellent powers of cognition as well.
Accordingly they were able to understand the concept of compromise, and they would form tacit pacts of mutual benefit, acknowledging each other's territory and not trespassing on it.
It was only that the winged jade-hued hawk had behaved with unusual rudeness and earned their hatred.
In any case.
Afterward the boar of the west and the white serpent of the south also showed behavior similar to the monkey's before them.
At first they would quietly feel out the situation, and then they would be startled by the spider's divine awareness and withdraw.
Of course, while that went on the cursed fiends were curious about what the strange monkey-shaped thing that always stayed at the spider's side was, but there was no way for them to know.
For these beasts had been born and raised and had lived their whole lives only inside this Eight Peaks Forest, and knew nothing of the world beyond this forest, outside the mountain range.
Only the enormous spider still remembered and ruminated on the world beyond, so that even as the seasons turned and the years turned and that repeated any number of times, it always recalled the motions of the old man Gok it had seen back then as it controlled the puppet.
Of course, that was far from the emotion of longing. It was closer to an act of searching out the path ahead on the basis of an informational record engraved in its mind.
So had there been no particular problem, Black Spider might well have been content with a life of about this much and spent its whole existence wagging a puppet about like that until it set out on the long road.
But before that, breakage came.
One day, with a SNAP.
The tip of the little toe of the hunchback puppet broke off.
At this Black Spider tried joining it back on using silk, but it could clearly feel that the movement had somehow become different from before.
Indeed.
A living body grows, and though it may be injured, it can also recover, whereas an object could never do so.
That was the very reason the old man Gok had polished and handled and tended his puppets so lovingly every single day.
At this rate there was no telling when another part would break. For now it was only a little toe, but what if the puppet's hand-blade were to break?
This was a puppet whose other built-in weapons had all been spent, so that the only weapon left was the hand-blade. Should that happen, the puppet's combat power would plummet as well.
In the end proper repair was needed. The problem was that Black Spider itself knew nothing whatsoever about how to repair it.
A fork in the road of choice had come. Was it to live on patching things roughly with silk like this, resigned to certain total ruin?
Or was it to go to the humans, even at the risk, and find out the repair technique?
Black Spider's eyeballs roll round and round. Black Spider is no longer that small, fuzzy, puppy-like spider of the old days.
It was a body more enormous than any common ox — a monster in the literal sense.
If it went to the humans looking like this, it was obvious that they would all be horrified and flee.
And would that be all?
Perhaps powerful special individuals like the old man Gok or those assassins might even swarm in and try to slaughter it.
At a time like this, if Yu Ran had been there she would have been a great help. Being on friendly terms with everyone in the village, she would have served splendidly as a bridge between Black Spider itself and the other humans.
But where she was and what she was doing now, having been taken away by those strange folk, was something Black Spider had no way of knowing.
The deliberation grows long. But it was also a deliberation whose answer had to some degree already been settled.
Black Spider's gaze turns east. It gazes past this world that had now become its own territory and grown quite familiar, past the black peak and the mountain range encircling it, to the east.
Black Spider steadies its resolve.
It was time to return to the human world once more.
***
"Whoa there!"
His foot had caught on a jutting stone by mistake. The carrying frame on his back tips right over and the firewood piled on it comes tumbling down.
If that were all, it would have been a matter of cursing a few times and picking it all up again.
The real problem was that in falling he must have twisted his right leg, for it throbbed so much that he could not possibly walk.
"Aigh. Damn it. They say an unlucky fellow breaks his nose falling over backward, and sure enough."
Grumbling that way, Gaeddong sits down for now with his back against a nearby tree. Looking his injured leg over, it was already starting to swell red, and he grows afraid that maybe a bone is broken.
There was nothing for it. For now, even leaving the firewood behind, getting back to the village came first.
He picks out a tree branch suitable to use as a staff and raises himself. As he was groaning and steadying himself unsteadily that way, a strange chill suddenly ran through Gaeddong.
Something huge seemed to be watching him. In the realm of instinct something rings an alarm bell. Something is wrong. It is wrong, and it is already too late!
Trembling all over, he slowly turns his head to look behind him.
Over that way, beyond the thick undergrowth, he could see something pitch-black coming toward him. A spider. A terrifyingly enormous spider was staring straight this way and striding closer.
"G-GAAAAH!"
Gaeddong screamed that way and fled in a panic. No — he tried to flee.
But his twisted leg would not answer him, and instead he even lost hold of the staff he was leaning on and fell to the ground in a graceless heap.
When the enormous spider had come right up close, his life flashes past Gaeddong's eyes like a revolving lantern.
Born the son of an ordinary farmer in the village, he had lived much like any other child.
And having turned fourteen this year, resting somewhere between boy and young man, Gaeddong had once been in love with a girl named Yu Ran who lived at the Gok Family Clinic up above the district.
He had dreamed of taking her to wife once he grew up and living cozily with seven children, but now there was no way to fulfill that dream, and so he could only resent this life for being so short.
"...If there is a next life, I want to become a martial artist and save the world together with comrades. And I would like a name that is splendid, like Baek Ung, not something grubby like Gaeddong."
As he made that final lament and calmly accepted the death that had come.
Suddenly Gaeddong understands that the thing he had braced himself for was not happening, and that instead an altogether unexpected situation was unfolding.
Fumble, fumble.
The pitch-black spider monster the size of an ox had stretched out a leg and was delicately feeling along his leg. Then, putting a little force into it, it sets the wrenched joint right back into place.
"GHRK!?"
As the agony ran shivering up his leg, the spider calmly took a tree branch for a splint, set it against the injured leg, and wound silk around it, whisking it into place.
What was more, the silk must have had some efficacy to it, for the throbbing pain soon eased somewhat, as though he had been given an anesthetic.
Only after it had finished all such emergency measures did the spider quietly draw its leg away and stare at Gaeddong, and somehow that gaze seemed a little familiar.
At this, Gaeddong realizes that in the revolving lantern he had just seen, there had been someone resembling this enormous monster before his eyes.
About three years ago.
When Gaeddong was around eleven years old, at the age of running about with a runny nose playing with the village children, there had been a wondrous spider that acted as though it understood human speech.
And that small spider and the spider before his eyes now were both alike pitch-black and covered in fuzzy hair.
So Gaeddong cautiously opens his mouth. Even as he opens it, he inwardly suspects that he may have gone mad.
"Uh.... Are you Black Spider, by any chance?"
Black Spider wagged one foreleg up and down.
It is a hand signal he knows. It is the answer meaning yes.
And so the ties of the past meet again.
One day, three years after the old man was murdered by the assassins, the girl was abducted by them, and the spider took the puppet and returned to the Eight Peaks Forest.
Black Spider, with the village youth Gaeddong seated on its enormous back because his injured leg would not let him move, headed for the humans' village with an imposing stride.
Gaeddong, riding atop it, was flustered at first, but soon he began to enjoy the situation, and each time the villagers who came upon him were startled out of their wits he would shrug his shoulders and put on airs.
"Now, now, elders. Do not be alarmed. It is me, Gaeddong. And this is Black Spider."