It had been about a month since the spider made its nest in the rock burrow and settled there.
In that time it had laid webs near the nest and caught and eaten all sorts of insects and beasts, recovering its strength considerably.
And using the naturally recovering cursed energy it had also made plenty of poison sacs, so now the spider was slowly readying itself to hunt cursed beasts again.
Its exoskeleton, which had been soft right after it finished the molt because it had been completely dissolved and then reconstituted, had now hardened firmly and was far sturdier than before, and the movements it could unfold on that basis had likewise become swifter and more tenacious.
But even so, whenever a hawk's cry was heard at the edge of the sky, the spider's blood would run cold.
SCREEEE—!
It could tell on instinct.
That the owner of that sharp cry ringing out from the blue vault above was surely a cursed fiend so powerful it could not even be compared to something like itself.
Honestly, if it had been up to the spider's own wishes, it would have liked to get out of that terrifying monster's territory and build its nest somewhere safe.
The problem, if any, was that even though the spider had already traveled a considerable distance in order to find this nest, the hawk's cry was still heard constantly.
This meant that the territory of that hawk cursed fiend was so vast that the spider could not dare imagine it, and it also meant that its speed was fast enough to cross that vast territory back and forth constantly.
So it still crawls along the ground. It hides its body in the darkness and targets only prey weaker than itself. That was the best choice the spider could make.
The one saving grace was that, as it happened, there seemed to be no particularly powerful cursed fiend in the area where the spider had built its nest, so every cursed beast it ran into was of a middling sort, much of a muchness.
And so, around the time it was piling up cursed energy bit by bit — catching and eating a purple moth, catching and eating a squirrel that raised electric shocks, catching and eating a lizard that turned its body transparent.
"GRAAAH!"
On its way back to its own nest after finishing a hunt, the spider ran into a blue weasel that savagely bared its teeth at it.
The weasel stood in front of the entrance to the spider's nest as though she had been waiting for the spider to return, and her whole body was covered here and there with half-healed wounds and scars.
She was one-eyed as well, for on one side there was a deep wound from which blood still flowed.
But even so, the energy flowing out of the weasel was anything but ordinary.
Seeing her, the spider's intuition drew its answer at once.
Fight and it loses without fail. It will certainly be eaten.
Though that weasel was now grievously wounded and in a wretched state, compared with the spider she was simply in a different weight class altogether.
An overwhelming predator in name and in fact. Ordinarily the spider would have hidden itself and fled at the mere cognition of her presence.
The problem was that it had run into that weasel of all things on this familiar path back to its own safe nest.
That familiarity had made the spider let its guard down.
In any case, the moment the weasel spotted the spider, she began to draw cursed energy up from the cursed core inside her body.
Then the wind around her tangled with the weasel's cursed energy and became a gale that wrapped around her body, forming a barrier.
The spider had never met a cursed beast that worked cursed arts as advanced as that. The cursed arts it had seen so far amounted at most to kindling a flame at a tail tip or raising electricity in a forepaw.
The energy the weasel gave off even felt as though it had gone a certain degree beyond the limits of her own ability, though the spider could not know the reason for that.
In any case, this made it certain that the weasel harbored hostility toward the spider.
The reason for that hostility was beyond the present spider's means to know, but in the immediate situation such a thing was hardly important either.
FWIP!
The spider fired silk at the weasel first, striking the opening blow. But though it was called an opening blow, in truth it was no more than a flailing attempt to buy a moment's gap to flee through.
The opponent was in a different weight class from the start. Against such an enemy there was no option other than to flee. It could only bind her with silk for even a moment and then take that chance to run for its life.
But even that was of no use whatsoever.
The silk the spider shot was torn to tatters by the blade wind the weasel raised, and in an instant it lost its cursed energy and crumbled away.
At the same time the weasel kicked off the ground and charged this way, and the spider could not even react to it properly.
SHRRK! SHRRRK!
The blade wind wrapping the weasel's body tore the spider's exoskeleton to shreds. The spider had no room to do this or that about it. In that gap the weasel bit down hard on the spider's body.
Undone by the weasel in an instant like that, the spider went limp, and the weasel took it in her mouth and dragged it into the spider's nest.
The webbing that had been strung across the nest entrance was already torn to shreds by something, and there hardly seemed to be any need to work out who had done such a thing.
Having stepped into the nest that way, the weasel flung the immobilized spider into a corner.
Then she gathered the scraps of blue fur and the bone fragments that lay strewn in a corner of the cave, and as she gazed at them she wept tears of blood, drop by drop, and licked them a few times, tenderly.
The instant it saw that sight, somehow the spider felt it could guess what the situation was.
The few strands of blue fur and the bone fragments it had seen when it first arrived at this cave long ago.
The color of that fur and the fur color of that blue weasel were exactly the same.
And those small bone fragments.... They had probably been the weasel's young.
That is, in a word.
That weasel cursed fiend had apparently misunderstood that, while she was away from her place, the spider had broken into her nest and eaten her young.
It was a misunderstanding, of course, but the spider had no means to clear it up. And even if there had been a means to clear it up, for a strong cursed beast to eat a weak one was so utterly natural a thing that it could not beg for its life either.
The spider felt the end of its life drawing near. Its eight eyeballs blinked as it cognized its own death. Fear rises. It is an instinctive dread of death. Of course, quite apart from that, the spider's consciousness is still mechanically grasping and analyzing the situation.
But contrary to the spider's thinking, death did not come right away.
CRUNCH!
"...!!!"
The weasel tore off just one of the spider's legs in a single bite.
Then she chewed it over and over and swallowed it down.
Next, she bit once more into the very place she had just bitten and chewed away at it. There was no sign at all of any intent to bite it dead in one stroke. If anything, she seemed to want the spider to survive as long as it possibly could.
Revenge.
Belatedly, the spider understood the weasel's thinking.
Right now the weasel was not tearing into it merely because she was hungry. Rather, she was returning to the spider, exactly as they had felt it — no, more than that — the pain her own young must have felt as they were eaten by the spider.
So it might well have felt bitterly wronged, yet the spider itself was rather composed. No — from the pain of being slowly chewed alive it was writhing on instinct to live, but its mind alone was absorbed in a somewhat irrelevant thought.
That is, the spider was examining for itself the concept of 'revenge' that it had just instinctively called to mind.
Frankly speaking, the weasel's present behavior had a strongly irrational aspect to it.
If she had taken wounds that severe, the right thing was not to waste time tormenting it like this, but to devour it quickly, take a rest, and restore her strength as fast as possible.
And yet the weasel chose tormenting the spider over recovering her own strength.
What was the reason for that? The spider wanted to understand that reason more clearly.
But that line of the spider's thought does not continue any further.
CRRUNCH!
The weasel, having chewed and swallowed all eight of the spider's legs, now began to tear into the spider's defenseless abdomen.
After tearing off the outer hide and chewing and swallowing the soft flesh and organs inside, she caught the black bead hidden deep within the spider between her molars and crushed it.
CRUNCH!
The instant the bead broke, the light of intelligence dwelling in the spider's eight eyeballs vanished. Even so, life force still remained in the flesh itself, and it thrashes on instinct.
After thrashing on a while longer like that, without reason.
The spider died.
And a single ink-black spider opens its eyes in the forest once more. Inside that spider's belly, the small black bead that had surely been crushed a moment ago existed intact, just as it was.
That spider 'thinks.'
It 'ponders' what the present situation means.
And at last it arrives.
Though it has not yet been refined into proper language, and therefore has not been fully made concrete in meaning.
Vaguely, at least, the spider begins to understand the concept of 'regression.'
Apparently, as for itself.
When it dies, it seems to return.
To precisely this point in time, at that.
And only now does the spider understand the memories of unknown origin it had held in its past lives—the source of all those memories that felt experienced though it had never experienced them.
They had all been memories of past lives. And it held the memories of its past lives now as well.
Its last life.
The spider had spun a web on a suitably large tree near here and eaten the seven-colored butterflies, the red mantis, the golden honeybee, and the mountain bird with three eyeballs.
After that, to find more prey, it had left the tree and roamed about hunting, then discovered the cave that had been the blue weasel's nest and molted there, generating a cursed core.
And it had made that cave its own nest and lived there, until it met the mother weasel that returned to the cave and was eaten.
This was the first time it had cognized cause and effect this clearly. The spider's eight eyeballs roll round and round as it continues its thoughts.
The spider's gaze turned toward a distant place. Far off at the edge, past the rotted, mouldering fallen leaves and beyond the moss-covered rock, it sees the great tree.
In its lives up to now, the spider had always gone to that tree first of all and spun its web there.
The first once or twice, out of mere instinctive attraction.
After that, out of a vague expectation that if it settled in that place it would get to eat delicious prey.
But now it does not do so.
Because by now it knows that settling in that place holds no great meaning.
A mere seven butterflies, one mantis with its head cut off, one honeybee, and one small mountain bird amount to no more than a single meal's worth for it as it is now.
Back when it was a tiny spiderling they would have been a rare and precious feast, hard to come by... but by now the situation had changed.
Instead the spider thinks of the cave that remains in its memory.
It recalls the strands of blue fur and the small bone fragments left in the cave.
It reasons it out.
If the weasel pups are still alive and unharmed in that cave right now.
And the mother weasel leaves her place for a long stretch as in the previous life.
And a cursed beast of unknown identity has not yet appeared and eaten the weasel pups?
In that case.
It would also be possible for it to snatch the weasel pups in that gap and eat them.
Also, if it had the capacity, it might even be able to hunt down the cursed beast that had secretly eaten the weasel pups in the previous life while it was at it.
And even if things did not work out so well, since it already knew the timing of the mother weasel's return, it would be able to withdraw at the appropriate moment and survive without harm.
The judgment was finished, and the spider began to act.
Retracing its memories, it headed for the place where the cave it had nested in stood, and at last, a few days later, it found the familiar cave.
The spider's judgment was not wrong. Five weasel pups were alive and unharmed in the cave. One of them, the eldest, was fairly large of bulk; three were much of a muchness; and the smallest one seemed to be the youngest.
There were two adult weasels as well.
One was the mother weasel it had seen in its previous life, and the other appeared to be her mate, a male weasel.
But that hardly mattered. In any case the spider knew the causality that at some point that weasel couple would leave their nest and abandon their young. So all the spider had to do was catch other assorted beasts nearby and wait for the moment.
And just as the spider expected, a few days later the weasel couple came to leave the cave.
SCREE—!
A small hawk of pale jade hue nimbly seized the youngest weasel, which had been playing in front of the cave, and carried it off.
The instant the parent weasels rushed out of the cave in a hurry to chase after it.
SCREEEE—!
Along with a cry quite familiar to the spider, this time an enormous hawk of deep jade hue cast an overwhelmingly huge shadow and snatched the male weasel away in its talons.
At that, the mother weasel, having lost a child and her husband both in an instant, did not know what to do. The children who came out after her looked up at the sky in bewilderment too.
In the midst of that, the mother weasel looked at the eldest, the most grown of them.
The eldest, though it had not yet reached full adulthood, was still fairly large of bulk. It had a cursed core within its body as well.
That eldest raises its head boldly as it looks at its mother.
The two weasels exchanged glances, and immediately after, the mother weasel abandoned her remaining young and hurried off in the direction the hawks had vanished. The eldest soothed the younger siblings its mother had entrusted to it and hid itself back inside the cave.
And so, at the mouth of the cave there remained only the four remaining weasel pups, and the spider, which had hidden itself nearby and was watching the whole situation.