One young man, one spider — the two of them trailed after the old man.
And so the place the old man finally arrived at was some shabby cobbler's shop. It was no different from any ordinary cobbler's shop; beside the entrance, a small wooden plaque was fixed in place reading .
Inside the shop, the smell of leather and adhesive hung thick in the air. Finished shoes stood displayed in a neat row along one wall, and beside them a display counter and a workbench and the like were clustered together.
The old man perched on the stool beside the counter with practiced ease, then set the wine, thin noodles, and dumplings that Gaeddong-i had bought onto the counter and began to drink.
Even while he did so, Black Spider's eyeballs rolled about, examining the surroundings. To the naked eye, there was nothing particularly noteworthy.
So he tried unleashing his divine awareness. It spread out from the center of Black Spider's brainstem and swept through the whole interior of the cobbler's shop in a single sensing pass.
Still nothing much. What he detected amounted to the common tools of a shoemaker; the only thing that struck him as somewhat curious was a staircase that led down deep beneath the floorboards.
At that point, however, Black Spider withdrew his divine awareness. Whatever else, this was the old man's private space. If he carelessly unfurled his divine awareness and went probing here and there, the old man might feel offended.
Of course, the old man had not reacted in any particular way to Black Spider's divine awareness just now either. He merely swallowed a few mouthfuls of green bamboo wine, picked up a dumpling, and ate it without concern.
He had clearly perceived this side's divine awareness from their very first meeting, yet judging by that attitude alone, it was doubtful whether he could truly detect divine awareness at all.
In any case, only after he had roughly finished his meal did the old man calmly look this way.
“Hand it over.”
He said it abruptly, then pointed at the puppet with his long pipe. When Black Spider passed the puppet over, the old man lightly unwound the thread wrapped around the puppet's right foot and inspected its interior.
He tapped at it lightly with his fingertips, and at times he pressed his ear to the puppet's surface and held his own breath.
“...As I thought, a puppet forged from refined thunderstruck jujube wood. A puppet of this caliber would not ordinarily be smashed so wretchedly.... It must have taken grievous damage in some great battle and then been left neglected for a long while. And at a glance, the traces left by its original master and the traces left by your handling remain clearly distinguishable, so your skill has not yet reached its original master's.”
The old man, who had muttered all this calmly and hit upon every correct answer, soon took strange medicinal ingredients from a chest of drawers, blended them, and applied the mixture delicately to the cross-section of the broken toe.
“For now I have bonded it, if only temporarily, with an adhesive mixed from jade lotus flower, pine resin, and the like. If you keep it firmly pressed for three days, it will not readily come apart again. But once it goes through force accumulation and force release, it will come loose in the end all the same, so if you would rather not see that, you will have to obtain refined thunderstruck jujube wood somehow and replace the part itself. No — rather than that, it might be better still to make a new puppet out of that wood. Strictly speaking, your puppet has already run out its lifespan. The quality of the material is so fine that it still holds its shape at all; its internal meridian schematic is a complete ruin. Did its original master burn away his primordial true energy or something?”
The old man handed the puppet back to Black Spider. Black Spider carefully spat out spider silk and wound it firmly around the bonded surface. At this, Gaeddong-i cautiously opened his mouth.
“Elder. In that case, where can that thunderstruck jujube wood be obtained?”
“What? Kuhaha!”
Suddenly the old man burst into loud laughter. He cackled for a good while at whatever he found so funny, then looked at Gaeddong-i with a sly glint in his eyes.
“Thunderstruck jujube wood goes by another name as well: evil-warding wood. When an ancient tree that has grown for more than several hundred years in a place thick with heaven-and-earth spiritual energy is struck by a thunderbolt, burns, survives it nonetheless, and then lives on for several hundred years more — only then is it thunderstruck jujube wood. It is so precious a thing that ordinary folk like us can hardly hope to lay eyes on it even once in a lifetime. I say this only now, but that puppet of yours alone, had you sold it off while it was still whole, would have fetched more than enough to buy a large mansion.”
At those words, Gaeddong-i's expression turned somewhat bitter. What it meant, in the end, was that Black Spider's puppet could not be repaired.
Black Spider, on the other hand, merely rolled his eyeballs about and showed no particular disappointment.
From the very start, handling the puppet himself, he had realized early on that its material was exceedingly special. So it was hardly strange that he could neither obtain it nor repair the puppet right away.
“Then is there truly no way to obtain it?”
When Gaeddong-i asked so mournfully, the old man laughed heartily again.
“Haha, bold of you. It is not as though there is no way at all. As I said before, had your puppet been whole it would have been worth the price of a mansion, so conversely, if you gather enough money to buy a mansion, you might well be able to obtain thunderstruck jujube wood. Provided there is any on the market, that is.”
While they were talking like this, someone suddenly poked their head in at the shop entrance.
When Gaeddong-i turned to look, there stood the beggar girl they had seen earlier.
Up close, though, the girl was simply badly pockmarked and severely homely of face; on closer inspection it was hard to call her a beggar at all.
Her clothes were tidier than expected and her condition was clean. It seemed they had mistaken her for a beggar only because her blemished face, and the hair she had let hang messily over it to hide it, made an unsightly impression.
“…….”
In any case, the girl said nothing and only leaned her head in to look this way, and just then the old man suddenly bellowed.
“Tsk! If you only ever hang back reading faces like that, who would not look down on you? Come in and sit at once.”
At that the girl came scurrying inside and sat across from the old man, all the while stealing glances at Gaeddong-i and Black Spider.
“What are you doing? These are the ones who saved you earlier — have you thanked them?”
Only when the old man bellowed again did the girl carefully bow her head, and even then she did not open her mouth once.
Only then could Gaeddong-i guess that the girl was mute and could not speak. Come to think of it, when the beggar boys had been tormenting her earlier, he seemed to have heard the word ‘cripple’ thrown about again and again.
Then the girl drew a small placard from her bosom — a peculiar thing made by layering several different kinds of leather.
The girl scratched something onto the placard with her fingertip and held it out; looking closely, the scratched and pressed marks left clearly on the layered leather surface formed letters.
[Thank you.]
Gaeddong-i and Black Spider, seeing it, only stared blankly without understanding, for neither of them knew how to read or write.
In any case, they had now obtained everything there was to obtain from the doll-maker old man.
In the end, even this old man could not repair the puppet without the material called thunderstruck jujube wood, and that wood was worth more than a decent mansion.
In short, there was nothing Black Spider or Gaeddong-i could do for the time being.
So they left the cobbler's shop and went to Gwak to explain the situation, and Gwak too made a pitying face.
But that was all. Black Spider's business had been settled, so for Gwak it was now time to depart for his next destination.
***
In the end, Gaeddong-i left Yulu County with Gwak a few days later. He left behind a promise that when he met Black Spider again someday, he would have become a great merchant who could procure even goods like thunderstruck jujube wood without difficulty.
In truth, there was nothing particularly useful Gaeddong-i could do by remaining at Black Spider's side either.
And so only Black Spider remained, now carrying the puppet on his back.
Thanks to the fame he had gained, the residents of Yulu County no longer startled at the sight of Black Spider, though that did not mean Black Spider went out of his way to wander through crowded places.
He merely settled himself in a dim corner of the back yard of the cobbler's shop the doll-maker old man ran and quietly observed what went on inside with his divine awareness.
By now Black Spider knew that the old man truly had not awakened divine awareness and was an ordinary human who could not handle any formless energy either.
Even though he was constantly spreading his divine awareness like this to observe the interior, the old man seemed to sense nothing of it at all.
In any case, the old man usually did nothing but puff away at his long pipe, and whenever customers came by now and then, he performed the work they asked of him.
And the mute girl lived with him, helping with simple chores.
They say a craftsman's skill shows even in the smallest movement of his hands.
Though it was no more than mending mere shoes, a strangely profound mystery could be felt in the old man's work.
The customers, however, seemed to understand none of this, and at times there were even those who complained that the old man's working attitude lacked sincerity.
Whatever they said, the old man remained unruffled. He seemed somehow to have risen above it all. With his cantankerous tongue and stiff neck leading the way, he would even overpower a customer's spirit instead.
There was not the slightest sign of the fawning and flattery of a merchant like Gwak. He simply said whatever he pleased.
Perhaps that was why. One day, a man who looked to be some high-ranking official bellowed furiously.
His reason was that he was such and such a great personage of such and such a house, and the old man's attitude was utterly insincere.
In the middle of it, the mute girl was struck by the official's swinging arm and fell. The official himself had had no intention of striking a young girl, but the deed was done all the same.
As he stiffened his neck all the more and went on bellowing, something heavy suddenly seemed to settle over the surroundings.
Beyond the cobbler's shop window, eight jet-black eyeballs rolled about, staring this way. A spider the size of a bull was glaring at him.
The divine awareness the spider had unleashed had wrapped around the official without anyone knowing and was exerting a strange pressure.
“...Ahem!”
An unease difficult to put into words wrapped around the official. He cleared his throat awkwardly a few times, and even so managed to throw a few more words at the old man before hurrying out of the shop.
Only then did the old man glance out the window. He had known that for the past several days Black Spider had settled behind the shop and spent all day observing him.
Until now, however, he had paid it no mind and treated the spider as though it were not there.
“...Hye-ju. Go to the kitchen, take out a few pieces of raw chicken, and feed that fellow. I have not once seen that spider eat anything these past several days.”
And so at last Black Spider came into the old man's good graces.
***
Even after that, however, Black Spider's daily life did not change much.
The old man still did nothing but mend shoes, and the only difference was that the mute girl — Hye-ju — occasionally brought Black Spider food.
While doing so, Hye-ju would sometimes speak to Black Spider — or rather, since she was mute she could not speak directly and conveyed her meaning through simple gestures and the like.
Then one day, Black Spider called Hye-ju over and began scraping something into the ground with his claw, and the shapes formed letters.
[Repairs]
Then he raised another leg to point at the repair bench where the old man was in the middle of his mending work and stared at her, and belatedly Hye-ju understood that Black Spider was asking whether what he had understood was correct.
Nod, nod!
Then Hye-ju scratched something onto the placard she always carried and pointed at herself.
[Hye-ju]
Black Spider, who had been staring blankly at it, soon turned his gaze down to the ground and scratched away with his claw.
Clumsily, Hye-ju's name was carved into the ground, and Hye-ju nodded.
After that, Hye-ju taught Black Spider every letter she knew, day after day.
Astonishingly, Black Spider never forgot a letter once he had seen it, and he understood clearly how to use them as well, so that from some point on he could string together sentences just like a person.
When Hye-ju even fetched him a primer, he memorized the entire book whole, to the point that his vocabulary surpassed Hye-ju's own.
As a result, the ground of the shop's back yard where Black Spider stayed was covered all over with the marks of scraping spider claws, and when the old man belatedly noticed this, he let out a shriek.
“You two! Keep it within reason before I bill you for repairs!”
At this, Hye-ju used a few sheets of leather from the workbench to make something similar to the placard she always carried and gave it to Black Spider as a gift.
It was a kind of engraving board, made by layering different types of leather so that even a light graze would leave a clear mark.
Since it was rather small, however, Black Spider wrote with the puppet's hand rather than moving his own claw, and used this way it proved convenient beyond compare.
Once several months had passed like that, not only the doll-maker old man but the neighboring residents as well grew accustomed to Black Spider's presence — and yet Black Spider still had not once seen the old man make a doll.
So Black Spider was the one to ask the old man.
[I wish to learn the craft of doll-making.]
The old man answered.
“Bullshit.”
He tossed the shoe he had been working on at Black Spider.
“Have you ever handled leather, or cloth, or even a single block of wood? A creature that cannot so much as crawl is trying to run from the start; you will be lucky to get away with a broken nose when you fall. Find out what is wrong with that shoe and how it ought to be fixed.”
Then the old man shut the door and went inside, and a moment later a spider leg rapped at the door.
[It is done.]
When the old man took it and examined it, the burst stitching had indeed been neatly set right, and the loose section had been drawn firmly tight.
“...Hm. I see. For what you are, you do not entirely lack an eye and a hand. Hm....”
Then the old man set another task before Black Spider, and this time too it took him no time at all to present an answer.
Measuring Black Spider's ability through various tasks for a while, the old man found, astonishingly, that his skill in handling shoes was already on par with a seasoned craftsman's.
“...What sort of creature is this?”
The old man regarded Black Spider with a sidelong look. Then he spoke.
“Well, in any case. As I said before, your puppet cannot be fixed because there is no material.”
[Correcting only its outward form will be enough.]
“Hm. From the sound of it, you have some form in mind?”
The old man fell into thought. Then he nodded lightly and opened a door beneath the floorboards that had been hidden under a cover.
“That bulk of yours will not fit down here. Follow me in with the puppet.”
And so the old man and Black Spider went down together into the underground workshop.
There stood the doll of a beautiful woman that looked exactly like a living person, and perhaps because it had been left neglected so long that dust lay thick upon it, it gave off an air more eerie than a corpse.
Black Spider, however, could only sense an object's outward shape through his divine awareness and did not perceive the scene in such detail; he could only surmise that there was an object imitating the human form to an extreme degree.
“...If it is only a matter of dressing up the outward form convincingly, then it is enough to imitate and render its shape and texture with materials of suitable quality. But mark my words. Unless a soul dwells within it, a doll is only a doll — which is to say, a mere puppet. It is an object and nothing more.”
The old man said this suddenly, yet even as he spoke, a deep, tangled sorrow lay in the gaze he turned upon the doll.