It sorts out its thoughts. The spider laid out in its head, step by step, the situation that had just unfolded before its eyes.
The mother weasel had left her place in order to save her husband and her youngest, who had been carried off in the hawks' jaws.
Thanks to that, all that remained in the cave were four weasel pups. The situation the spider had longed for had come about.
Of course, it was not as though there were no minor problems.
Among the young there was the eldest, fairly large of bulk and well grown.
If it were to settle matters with that one head-on right now, even the spider could not guarantee victory. No doubt the reason the mother had been able to abandon her young and leave her place was that she trusted that eldest.
But.
The spider had not come here to fight with its life on the line in the first place. It had merely come to hunt.
An excellent hunter does not court danger. It only watches for an opportunity.
And so the spider, concealed near the cave, went on holding its breath without the slightest movement, only watching the situation. Waiting quietly like this, with patience, was also the spider's inborn nature.
A few days passed.
Over those few days the weasel pups did not show themselves outside the cave even once. They seemed set on hiding inside the cave and waiting until their mother returned.
But though they waited that long, the mother weasel did not return, and finally, on the night of the seventh day, in the dead of a night with the full moon risen, the eldest carefully slipped out of the cave.
Perhaps because it had gone hungry for days on end, the eldest's form in the moonlight looked more haggard than before. It had probably not been able to sleep properly either.
The eldest scanned its surroundings this way and that with sharp eyes, then nimbly left the cave. At last the eldest had separated from the group, alone.
But even so, the spider did not chase after it. It merely stays hidden as it is, holding its breath. By the spider's judgment, it was not yet the time.
And a short while later.
The eldest came back to the cave with two plump rabbits in its mouth. The rabbits did not seem to be cursed beasts harboring cursed energy; they seemed to be ordinary animals it had caught simply to fill their bellies for the time being.
Having watched the eldest carry the rabbits into the cave, the spider was at last certain that the time had come.
Even so, it does not move at once. The spider waited quietly until the moon had set and dawn drew near, until all around was at its darkest.
Then, suddenly, when the thick darkness had settled and even the landscape was stained black and still.
Quietly, without so much as the sound of a blade of grass brushing, it raised its black body.
"......."
With quiet steps it approached the cave.
Beneath a dark night sky where even the moonlight had vanished.
The dark interior of the cave was pitch black, with not a single ray of light entering it.
From the entrance, breathing could be felt.
It was the breath of the weasel pups.
The spider's eight legs headed into the depths of the cave without hesitation, without making any sound at all.
The spider already knew the cave's inner structure inside out. Where to step and where not to step, and in what shapes the weasel pups would be curled up asleep — it seemed to see it all at a glance.
Warmth could be felt.
The cursed energy of the weasel pups, sleeping soundly with their tension released after a meal at long last, their warm body heat, the sound of their heartbeats, seemed to spread out red through the silent cave, so that the spider felt it could sense it all even with its eyes closed.
The weasel pups knew nothing and were only sleeping soundly. The eldest, who ordinarily would have kept its own eyes open and sat up through the night even while its siblings slept, was no different.
But it was not a strange thing. They had endured day after day of starvation in the midst of tension, and only today had they barely filled their bellies.
That nothing had happened over these past few days, and that their tension had eased with the relief of filling their bellies for the first time in a while — that could not be helped.
And this situation was precisely the moment the spider had been aiming for.
The spider's senses caught the eldest, which was giving off the thickest cursed energy.
After moving soundlessly to right beside its head, it drove its venom-fangs straight into the nape of its neck.
CHOMP!
There was no battle. There was only an ambush.
GLUG, GLUG.
The poison sacs the spider had kept inside its mouth all burst at once, and the venom held in them flowed down the venom-fangs into the eldest weasel. And with that, it was over.
What followed was nothing more than an enumeration of events that need no explanation whatsoever.
The remaining weasel cursed beasts apart from the eldest were young individuals that had not even formed cursed cores yet.
Such young pups, sleeping soundly in their exhaustion, were poisoned by the spider's venom and their bodies stiffened without their even recognizing what was happening.
Having subdued all four weasel pups in an instant like that, the spider wound them round and round with silk and made them into cocoons.
It could tell just from smelling the scent that wafted off them.
This prey was, taking the whole of the spider's lives together, the most precious it had ever had.
One weasel cursed fiend equipped with a cursed core, and three weasel cursed beasts that, inferior though they were, still harbored fairly thick cursed energy of their own.
A feast of this caliber was the first since it had eaten the seven-colored butterflies, the red mantis with its head cut off, and the exhausted golden honeybee that had luckily blundered into its web back when it was a spiderling.
Its appetite stirs of its own accord. But the spider did not go out of its way to act in haste.
Ahead of its meal, the spider first spun webbing across the cave entrance to block it. But rather than binding the entrance up completely as before, it was closer to draping a few strands of silk over it roughly.
However, when it joined a single thin thread to the webbing it had built and drew it into the depths of the cave, then set its own tactile sense against it, now it could feel even from inside the cave that wind was blowing outside.
The swaying of the webbing strung at the entrance became vibration and was transmitted to the spider as a signal.
This much would let it detect anything like an intruder at once.
Only then did the spider carefully tear open the smallest of the four cocoons.
Inside the cocoon, the weasel pup, unconscious from the venom, was being liquefied from the organs outward as the venom dissolved it, so that the spider could ingest it easily.
When it sank its mouthparts in and sucked and swallowed, an enrapturing flavor was soon felt.
Thick cursed energy goes gulping down its throat along its mouthparts. Each time it swallows, the spider's belly sloshes and heaves.
The spider's black cursed core raises its rotational force within, gathering the cursed energy in, and grows that rotational force greater and greater. And so cursed energy gradually begins to pool ever more thickly around the cursed core.
Fundamentally, when recovering cursed energy through breathing alone, the limit of that recovery is confined to the inner space of the cursed core. Once the inside of the cursed core is full, cursed energy fills no further.
But when ingesting cursed energy directly like this, then even if the inside of the cursed core is packed full, the cursed energy piles up covering the outside of the cursed core in a spherical form.
And in time, cursed energy that has finished assimilating with the energy inside the body merges with the cursed core, and in that way the cursed core itself gradually grows.
***
A few days passed.
In that time the spider stayed on inside the cave, eating the weasel pups one by one until it had digested them all.
But even after gorging to this extent, it had not yet reached a molt.
Unlike before, eating this much no longer brought it straight to a molt.
Even so, it was a fact that it had grown far stronger than before.
In any case, even after eating all the weasel pups, the spider did not leave the cave and built its nest in the cave as in its previous life.
SHFFF.
The spider drew thread from its rear and made a small jar. It was a silk jar of the kind used when making poison sacs.
Into that jar it poured venom holding far more cursed energy than usual.
Then this time the jar could not hold the venom and melted away from the inside. The cursed energy held in the venom was too thick and too strong, and the silk jar could not withstand it.
So the spider built the jar with silk richly imbued with cursed energy as well. Then this time the jar did not melt away in the poison and held up well.
Having made one such powerful potent poison sac, the spider rested a while. Making a single poison sac had consumed three-tenths of the cursed energy inside its cursed core.
But the spider does not think of this as waste at all. If anything, it only regrets that it cannot make more potent poison sacs.
Of course, if it forced the matter it could make about three a day, but that would leave the cursed core empty and only make it more vulnerable to an enemy's attack.
If only to prepare for any eventuality, making about one potent poison sac a day was the most efficient.
In any case, the reason the spider came to invest so much cursed energy in manufacturing potent poison sacs owed largely to having felt for itself, in actual combat last time against the eldest weasel, just how powerful the effect of a poison sac was.
The eldest weasel, a cursed fiend on par with the spider, had been finished off without so much as a struggle by a single attack that spent no more than a few ordinary poison sacs.
Of course, this was also thanks to the ambush under cover of darkness, but in any case it had certainly been proven that poison sacs definitely raised the spider's instantaneous attack power.
If ordinary poison sacs alone had this much force, then a potent poison sac harboring more powerful venomous energy stood a high chance of being effective even against an enemy stronger than the spider itself.
And as it happened, the spider was also in a situation where there was a high chance it would encounter a cursed fiend stronger than itself before long.
Around the time of its previous life.
The cursed fiend of unknown identity that had arrived at the cave before it did, eaten the weasel pups, and left behind only some of their fur and bone fragments.
Because that cursed fiend might well come to this place again in the not so distant future.
Even in the previous life, the weasel bone fragments the spider found had long since been left neglected and dried out, so the point at which that thing ate the weasel pups would have been not long after the mother weasel left.
At the outside, the affair would have taken place within a month of the mother's departure.
So now, with about two weeks passed since the mother weasel left the cave, for the spider to prepare for this in advance was an utterly natural and moreover wise course of action.
And so, while the spider was manufacturing potent poison sacs, it also from time to time brought prey it had hunted into the nest and scattered their blood and organs here and there about the cave, though the reason for this could not yet be known.
***
One night on the dark of the moon, when not even moonlight remained.
In one corner of the dark forest, something yellowish and long suddenly seemed to writhe and crawl along the ground.
Watching it closely, its surface was covered without a gap in glistening copper-hued scales, and at its end was attached a rounded snake's head, from between whose jaws a bright red tongue was flicking.
Its identity was none other than a yellow serpent. Its body length alone exceeded thirty feet, and it was a powerful cursed fiend with a sallow-yellow cursed core firmly settled inside its body.
As prey had run out in the territory where it had originally lived, it had quietly trespassed into another cursed fiend's territory.
That serpent cursed fiend crossed the pitch-dark forest, advancing without making any sound at all.
Then, at some point, the serpent's sense of smell detected a faint cursed energy mixed in among a thick smell of blood; this happened around the time it reached a spot where a small hillside could be seen far off.
It was a strange thing. It was not that some small cursed beast had been detected, nor that a large cursed fiend had been detected either. It was as though thin cursed energy were faintly spread here and there over the whole area. And on top of that, a rank smell of blood overlaid the situation.
At the strange situation, the serpent stuck out its tongue and concentrated harder on sensing. Then it could tell that the cursed energy and the smell of blood led toward the rocks below the hill located far off.
So the serpent moved slowly toward the rocks. While it did, some spider silk or other kept clinging annoyingly to its body, but the silk was so weak and thin that it did not much mind.
Arriving beneath the rocks that way, it saw a passage leading inward and webbing that seemed to have been strung loosely and roughly across the crevice.
Cursed energy could be felt from the webbing spanning the mouth of the passage. And a rank smell of blood was wafting out from between that webbing.
The serpent's developed sense of smell also made out the thick scent of a furred beast that had lingered here for a long time.
This place seemed to have been the dwelling of a fairly powerful furred beast at one time.
But now, judging from the webbing strung at the entrance, it seemed the furred beast had left its place and a spider cursed beast had taken it over.
Judging by the level of the webbing strung at the entrance, the spider cursed beast's level did not look particularly impressive either.
With webbing this thin and flimsy, the most it could manage would be to catch small land beasts or mountain birds and eat them.
The serpent's tongue flicks constantly, reading the smells in the air. Through it, having become certain there were no risk factors beyond what it had grasped, it slowly begins to push its huge body into the depths of the cave.
The cave's interior is quiet and dark. A strange smell, nearly tasteless and odorless, met the snake's tongue.
This was probably the smell of the spider cursed beast. Judging by how poorly even its own sense of smell detected it, it seemed to be of a kind naturally faint in scent.
But that hardly mattered. The serpent had already pushed half its body inside the cave, and judging by the flow of air within, this cave's only way in and out seemed to be the one rock crevice it had entered through.
That is to say, the spider inside already had no escape route.
Thinking that as it burrowed all the way into the innermost depths of the cave.
Suddenly, the serpent somehow got a strange feeling. An unease, as though it had fallen into some trap.
The reason was simple.
Nowhere in the open space deep inside the cave was there any sign of the spider cursed fiend.
All that could be seen were a bundle of webbing giving off cursed energy, and the corpses of beasts whose organs had been deliberately torn open so that the smell of blood would waft thickly.
As though cursed energy and the smell of blood had been given off on purpose to make it come all the way here....
The instant the serpent's thoughts reached that point.
Suddenly, CHOMP! — it felt something bite deep into its tail from outside the cave. Through that bite wound it also felt something like a liquid gurgling and seeping in.
It was the moment when, on top of the venom the spider spewed from its fangs with all its strength, the venom of a full three potent poison sacs additionally seeped into the snake's body.