It scatters webs steeped in cursed energy in every direction, then waits with bated breath until weak cursed beasts, hooked by them, appear.
Meanwhile, it suppresses the cursed energy flowing out of itself as much as it can and hides its own presence.
Though no one had taught it, the spider judged and learned on its own, gradually developing its methods of hunting.
Repeating its hunts in this way, the spider came to pass through yet another molt.
The spider instinctively felt that this molt would take far longer and be far more important than the previous ones.
So it had to find a hiding place where it could safely conceal its body for the duration of the molt.
Up in a tree was not a good choice.
Though the treetops were safe from beasts that crawled the ground, the forest held not only land beasts but flying ones as well.
Most of them were weak, of course, like the mountain bird with three eyeballs.
But there were also rare flying cursed beasts as huge and powerful as the jade-hued hawk, so if it attempted its molt up in a tree, there was no telling when such creatures might catch sight of it and make it a single mouthful.
So what it needed was a cave sunk down beneath the ground, a space with a narrow entrance and hard material that could block intrusion from outside.
But finding such a place was not simply easy.
The spider had grown considerably even after that last molt, and was now far bulkier than any common wild dog.
Its body alone reached two feet, and if it stretched out all eight legs and spread them, the span reached a full six feet.
Places fit to safely conceal a body this large were not so common. The spider had to wander for quite a long while.
Then one day, the spider happened upon a cave perfectly suited to it.
A crevice among rocks at the foot of a small hill. It was the sort of place where, if you went straight in, a fairly spacious chamber opened up.
Perhaps some other beast had once used it as a nest, for a tuft of blue fur and small fragments of animal bone lay strewn about in an inner corner, but apart from that there was nothing particularly unusual.
So the spider pushed its body into the burrow, then covered over the entrance it had come through with webbing.
Then it wrapped its own body in silk to make a cocoon and showed no movement for nearly several weeks.
During that time, other land beasts occasionally prowled in front of the burrow, and torrential rain poured outside, but the thick webbing at the exit was never breached. Only a little rainwater seeped in through a tiny crevice for a while.
While the time passed like that, a strange change was taking place inside the cocoon.
At first cursed energy occasionally leaked out little by little through gaps in the cocoon, but as time passed such leaking grew less and less, until from some point not a single drop flowed out at all.
That phenomenon did not mean that the spider's cursed energy had all been exhausted.
Quite the opposite.
At that moment, more cursed energy than ever before was seething inside the spider's body.
VRRRMMM...!
Something congealed into a round mass deep inside the spider's body vibrates. The identity of that round something was none other than a lump of cursed energy.
Energy that had originally been faintly scattered throughout its whole body had gathered in one place at high density in a round form. That was why the cursed energy flowing out around the cocoon had also seemed to vanish.
At some point, the lump of cursed energy thus gathered began to pulse slowly but strongly, like a heart.
THUD! THUD!
Each time it beat that violently, cursed energy burst outward, and in the process some cursed power was expended as well, but that was not the important thing.
THUD! THUD!
Each time the cursed energy repeated its condensation and relaxation, a powerful shock occurred over and over at its center.
Every time a shock occurred, the inside of the spider's body was churned into a wreck as well, yet even so the lump of cursed energy did not stop pulsing and kept beating like a heart.
Starting from the point where the pulsing occurred, the temperature gradually rose until it seemed to boil furiously, and the spider's flesh actually melted in that heat and liquefied.
As it melted its whole body away, repeating only the condensation and relaxation of cursed energy, suddenly, at the innermost center of that pulsing energy, something very small, the size of a fingernail, began to form.
That something had the shape of tiny black grains clumped together; the grains were clumped, but not yet fully joined, so it gave more the impression of a cluster of bubbles.
And each time the cursed energy condensed, the cluster of bubbles was compressed further, until at last, at some point, it slowly began to change into the form of a single small sphere.
A bead formed of small fragments loosely drawn together and clumped.
Its size was at most that of a little fingernail.
But the instant that tiny bead was completed into a perfect spherical form, a strange wavelength spread out from the bead and stirred the interior of the cocoon, melted by the intense heat, once through.
At the same time, the flow of cursed energy, which until then had only clumped in a round mass and pulsed, was drawn along by the wavelength, rotating and spreading in a great circle, and then stabilized around the bead.
Along with that, the spider's flesh inside the cocoon, which had melted from the high temperature, began to take on regularity again and rearrange itself, and so, a few hours later, by the time the heat radiating from the cocoon had cooled entirely.
CRACK, CRACK.
The bone-dry cocoon split cleanly in two, and from within it the spider, its molt complete, slowly raised its body.
The spider, judging by outward appearance alone, seemed hardly different from before.
If anything, in terms of bulk it had shrunk to nearly less than half of what it was before the molt, and its ink-black body had merely darkened a little further than before; apart from that, no other distinguishing feature could be seen.
Only, in its eight glittering eyeballs, like obsidian, some strange profound aura seemed to dwell, unlike before.
"......."
The spider looks around, glancing over its surroundings.
Question, search, cognition, comprehension.
Just then, a small puddle of water came into the spider's view.
It was the torrential rain that had poured outside a few days earlier, which had flowed in through the gaps of the web-blocked entrance and pooled in one corner of the cave.
Standing before it, the spider looks down at the puddle. It cognizes the image reflected on the water's surface.
Eight black eyeballs, rolling round and round.
A jet-black body, dark as ink.
It tries wiggling its mouthparts lightly, and lifts a foreleg to wave it about this way and that.
And at the end of moving about like that, reflecting its body in the puddle over and over.
It understands that the single black spider reflected on the water's surface is itself.
It was the moment the spider, having crossed beyond the realm of cognition into the realm of consciousness, at last awakened a self and realized its own existence.
And this change was precisely the greatest harvest the spider had gained from this molt. To be precise, it was thanks to the cursed core it had formed in this molt that it had at last awakened consciousness and built up a self.
The cursed core.
Fundamentally, once a cursed beast accumulates a certain amount of cursed energy within its body, it instinctively condenses it into the form of a round sphere.
Condensing cursed energy this way keeps the cursed energy from flowing out of the body, and also allows it to be burst out powerfully in an instant as needed.
However, when such condensation of cursed energy reaches a certain level, there are times when a crystal forms inside it, and this was called a cursed core.
And this cursed core could be called the very boundary line dividing cursed beasts from cursed fiends.
A cursed beast without a cursed core is, literally, no more than an animal; even if it possesses cognition, it can hardly be said to have formed a self.
By contrast, a cursed beast that has formed a cursed core comes to possess consciousness in earnest, beyond cognition, and from that moment it becomes a cursed fiend possessed of a self.
But for that very reason, forming a cursed core was by no means an easy thing.
Most cursed beasts merely gather and condense cursed energy on instinct, then repeatedly spend the cursed energy they have gathered on working cursed arts.
Then, if by chance the amount of condensed cursed energy piles up enough to cross the critical point, a cursed core forms naturally through internal pressure.
But the spider had instinctively forced its cursed energy to condense and had formed a cursed core.
Such a case was exceedingly rare even among countless cursed fiends, but there was no way for the spider to know such a thing.
The spider merely thinks and judges on the basis of its present situation.
The spider rolls its eyes round and round. That gaze sweeps over the burrow, examining it.
Originally, this burrow was no more than a hiding place to be used briefly for the molt.
But now that the molt was finished, the spider was, physically, in a far weaker state than before.
The cursed energy it had gathered had also been considerably exhausted in the process of forming the cursed core, so if it carelessly went outside in its present state, it might well be eaten by other cursed beasts.
So for now it decides to rest inside the burrow. As it happened, since its bulk had also shrunk by more than half from before, there was no particular inconvenience in staying inside.
It spins the webbing blocking the entrance anew as well.
Whereas before it had stopped the entrance up completely, now it left it somewhat looser, making enough space for the spider itself to come and go.
Having resolved to stay here and use it as a base for a while, it repairs and reinforces the burrow itself here and there with webbing, making it sturdy.
And so the spider's nest was made.
***
Several days had passed since the spider made its nest and settled there.
During that time, the spider had laid webs here and there around the burrow.
Since it had not yet recovered enough to hunt cursed beasts, most of the webs it laid were ordinary ones without cursed energy.
It was recovering its strength by using those ordinary webs to catch and eat ordinary insects.
But then a strange thing happened.
The cursed energy that had clearly been exhausted almost to the bottom was, from some point, slowly filling up again.
Fundamentally, it was hard to replenish cursed energy by eating only ordinary insects or beasts. To obtain cursed energy properly, one had to eat cursed beasts that likewise harbored cursed energy.
And yet the cursed energy inside the spider's body was recovering naturally, and at the root of it was the small black bead, that is, the cursed core.
The bead itself did not seem to be producing cursed energy. Rather than producing or spewing out anything, the bead itself seemed to be quietly generating a rotational force within, all on its own.
Only, each time the spider breathed, some faint energy was drawn inside its body along with the breath, then pulled by the bead's rotational force to pool at its center.
And that unknown energy, gathered there, fused with the energy inside the spider's body and gradually became cursed energy.
But this recovery of cursed energy did not continue without limit. A few days later, on a rainy day, the spider noticed that the cursed energy in its body no longer recovered naturally. As though the vessel of cursed energy within it, the inside of the cursed core, had been filled to the brim.
So, as a test, it drew out silk containing faint cursed energy to expend a little cursed energy, and found that only the amount expended began to slowly fill back in.
After several repeated experiments, the spider understood the structure of it: that this natural recovery had a limit, and once that limit was reached, cursed energy accumulated no further.
Having thus calculated by feel the maximum capacity of naturally recovering cursed energy and its rate of recovery, the spider was able to infer the amount of cursed power it could expend in a day without strain.
And it thought.
That if it did nothing, as it was now, that was no different from wasting as much cursed energy as recovered naturally.
Then what would be best to do?
Putting cursed energy into the webs surrounding the nest was by no means a good choice.
For that could well draw the interest of other, powerful cursed beasts.
But leaving the recovering cursed energy alone was a waste as well.
As it pondered, something came into the spider's sight.
The small puddle that had pooled inside the cave from the torrential rain during the last molt.
Over the past few days it had gradually dried up until now only a water stain remained....
"......!"
The instant it saw that, a certain thought suddenly flashed through the spider's mind. The sight of water pooling gave the spider a kind of inspiration.
Presently the spider slipped out its venom-fangs and let venom trickle drop by drop from their tips.
The venom that flowed down held cursed energy, making it a far more potent poison than ordinary venom.
Even so, the moment it touched the bare ground it seeped into the earth and its energy grew faint. The amount was far too small to pool the way the puddle had.
But.
When the spider spewed silk to make a small jar and poured the venom inside it, the venom pooled, sloshing faintly within the jar.
Having filled the jar with a suitable amount of venom, the spider sealed the top over with webbing as well, completing a poison sac.
If it held the completed poison sac lightly inside its mouth, near its fangs, and bit down to burst it when needed, it would be able to inflict great damage in an instant when facing a powerful cursed beast.