The spider did not realize it, but the direction in which the jade-hued hawk had vanished was west.
Accordingly, the spider had been moving east all this time.
And so the sun and the moon rise in the direction the spider faces and set behind its back, over and over without end.
Thanks to that, the spider did not yet come to understand the existence of heavenly bodies, but it did at least come to know from where to where the bright lights up in that sky travel.
While wandering that way, it did on occasion encounter other cursed beasts, but the spider did not go out of its way to hunt them and mostly ignored them.
Since eating a few of such creatures would bring it no great gain anyway, and it judged that getting out of the hawk's territory as quickly as possible mattered more than that.
The cursed beasts likewise showed no sign of reacting much to the spider, and this was because from the cursed beasts' standpoint there was no particular reason to eat a spider that was not even a cursed beast and had no taste to speak of either.
Of course, this was a misapprehension on the cursed beasts' part. In reality the spider was a powerful cursed fiend that could devour trifling cursed beasts like them in an instant if it so chose, but the misunderstanding arose because its ability to conceal its energy inside itself was so outstanding.
In any case, while it went on moving aimlessly eastward for several weeks like that, one day the spider came upon an enormous mountain range that filled its field of vision from left to right, and, in front of that range, a single black peak that rose dizzyingly high.
The black peak in front of the range was quite grotesque in shape: it was jet black all over and had several joints to it, so that it resembled an insect's leg bent inward.
And yet it was so high that it seemed to stretch past the mountain range and up into the sky itself, far beyond sight.
Of course, that in itself left no particular impression on the spider. What made the spider wonder came after it had passed that peak and just crossed over the ridge.
Fundamentally, the spider could also absorb the energy in the air through breathing—that is, spiritual energy—and accumulate it in the cursed core inside its body to recover cursed energy; and it suddenly got the feeling that the density of this spiritual energy had grown distinctly thinner than before.
It was as though the very nature of the atmosphere had changed with this mountain range as its dividing point.
That was not the only strange thing.
Afterward, as it descended along the slope on the far side of the range, the spider noticed that the number of cursed beasts had decreased to an uncanny degree.
Then, around the time the range ended and the land became outright flat, cursed beasts could not be found no matter how hard it looked, and the animals it ran into were all nothing but ordinary land beasts.
Only then did the spider understand the situation.
This land, beyond the mountain range, was a place where cursed beasts did not live because the spiritual energy was thin.
For in a place where the energy was this thin, cursed beasts would be short of things to eat.
That is to say, in this place it might be able to live without worrying about the jade-hued hawk.
But not everything had been confirmed yet. Its assumptions so far were merely the spider's own reasoning, and there was a need to examine them more closely.
So the spider kept moving eastward and went on examining its reasoning.
To give the result first, the spider's reasoning was correct.
The farther it went from the mountain range, the thinner the spiritual energy in the atmosphere became, and the smaller the grass and trees grew as well.
Then, from a certain point on, the concentration of spiritual energy no longer dropped and was maintained at a constant level, and that point was probably the boundary line dividing the range's sphere of influence from the world outside it.
In any case, in the process of establishing this reasoning, the spider instinctively understood a certain concept.
The fact that spiritual energy, too, has highs and lows like terrain, and that those highs and lows are distinguished by density.
That is, incomplete though it was, the spider had come to grasp an understanding of spirit veins on its own.
In any case, the spider could at last feel a sense of relief.
The jade-hued hawk would not roam as far as such barren land, so it had at last found a safe place.
The problem, if any, was that the spider itself still needed something to eat.
As for simple hunger, thanks to how much smaller its bulk had become, eating a single small land beast like a mouse was enough, but the problem was ingesting cursed energy.
In this land barren of spiritual energy, where it was hard to find even one cursed beast, survival might be possible but growth looked impossible.
So the spider went back to the fringes of the mountain range, found a suitable cave to make its nest, and whenever it set out to hunt it would cross over to the far side of the range and catch petty cursed beasts.
The cursed beasts it caught were so petty that it was a shame, but even so, the mere fact that no hawk's cry was heard from the sky at all was quite satisfying.
***
Several weeks passed in a flash since the spider settled at the edge of the mountain range.
In that time the spider gained no great harvest in particular and was content merely with catching and eating a few petty cursed beasts now and then.
Though it could not eat delicious prey to its heart's content, with its personal safety guaranteed, its mind could not have been more at peace.
That environment brought the spider the leisure to contemplate.
In fact, of late the spider had been spending most of the hours of the day 'thinking.' The spider had always lived thinking, of course, but recently that tendency had grown far stronger.
Was it because a vast consciousness was crammed into a relatively small body? It seemed as though the density of its consciousness had risen compared with before.
In any case, the thoughts the spider was absorbed in were none other than those concerning the mother weasel and the jade-hued hawk.
That last time.
The events of when it encountered the mother weasel and the jade-hued hawk were still vividly engraved in the spider's memory. In particular, the wondrous cursed arts those two cursed fiends had displayed kept surfacing in its mind.
The mother weasel had raised a blade wind with cursed energy to spread a protective barrier while simultaneously heightening her own speed and attack power, and the jade-hued hawk had loosed her own feathers from a distance to show off terrifying destructive force.
The spider itself, by contrast, had not a single means of countering their cursed arts. In truth, even the tactic of cutting flesh to break bone that it had used against the mother weasel was a strategy it could choose only because the mother weasel's whole body was already covered in wounds.
It was not enough.
Setting aside the mere gap in weight class, the spider realized that it fell far short of the mother weasel or the jade-hued hawk.
In fact this was only natural. For a young spider not even a year past its birth to catch up all at once to the skill of powerful cursed fiends that had reigned as overlords of the forest for long ages was an unreasonable thing from the start.
It was only that the spider, repeating death and lifetime, had been able to carry the growth it gained in a previous life over into the next, and so was strong for its years.
Weight class like this can be increased simply by eating other cursed beasts.
But the domain of technique seemed to be another matter.
At last the spider realizes the necessity of training.
But what should it train, and how?
The spider's thinking turns over one scheme after another. The thing it lacks most right now. That is survivability.
Against cursed beasts weaker than itself, it can hunt easily with its weight class, its speed, its stealth and its venom-fangs, but conversely, when it faces an enemy of a heavier weight class head-on, its ability to escape is extremely poor.
If only it could secure an ability to escape, it would not need to live in privation in a place thin in spiritual energy as it did now.
But no matter how it thought about it, no means came to mind for shaking off the mother weasel or the jade-hued hawk once they had caught sight of it.
The most it could do would be to fire off bundles of silk, and it had already experienced twice over that that level was not enough even to shake off a mother weasel on the brink of death.
So it tries changing its viewpoint. If there is no way to get free once a powerful enemy has caught sight of it, then what about catching sight of the powerful enemy first and leaving the place in advance?
In fact this strategy is effective. Back when it lived in the forest, the spider had always laid thin silk in every direction and connected it to its own tactile sense.
Indeed, when it ambushed the serpent, it had felt the silk it had laid being broken by the serpent's thrashing and had conjured up a three-dimensional image in its mind of the serpent floundering.
But in the end this was a method possible only if it laid the silk in advance. And even then, once the silk was broken it completely lost its ability to sense until it laid it again.
That is, the spider needed a sensing ability that was both immediate and at the same time sustainable. There was a need to be able to cognize a wide range while sitting still.
In the end, what mattered was recognition. Perhaps it could also be called consciousness. In the end the crux is 'awareness.' Only 'knowing' can serve as the sole concept that grounds action. Thought is the very proof of existence.
And such 'awareness' already existed within the spider.
The consciousness established through the self that was built upon the cursed core.
That consciousness, compressed and compressed again inside its narrow body, was what was making the spider work through this multitude of thoughts.
This phenomenon was not so simply because the spider's body had grown smaller than before.
From the beginning the spider had possessed an unusually vast 'awareness' for its weight class. When the spider's life ends, and the world turns over in an instant and returns to the very beginning, from where does the capacity of that vessel of transmission—which holds the erased information of the past and sends it into the future—arise?
The spider does not know. Perhaps no one could know. Only that the origin of it might, perhaps, be joined to the spider's awareness.
That awareness of the spider's writhes inside its body. Formless cognition, which by nature ought to have no substance, is crushed down by the pressure of its thinking and clumps smaller and smaller, until at the very last it cannot withstand that pressure and bursts out in every direction.
And so 'threads of consciousness,' like spider silk, stretched out all at once from the spider's brain stem to every quarter. The substanceless threads of consciousness cognized every object they touched.
This phenomenon was not the result of the spider having suddenly grasped something.
It was simply that, just as when the spider first instinctively drew silk and built a web long ago, an inborn function was being exercised according to an inborn nature.
Had some cultivator watched this phenomenon, he would have said of it that the spider had opened its divine awareness.
Only, the spider did not know such an expression, and merely felt that its own 'thought' had come to cognize and sense the world more distinctly than before.
The world feels more vivid than before. Its eight eyeballs roll round and round as they observe this phenomenon.
A manner of sensing altogether different from cognition based on eyesight.
With this ability, it might be able to sense a powerful enemy at a distance in advance and flee ahead of time.
***
Even after awakening its divine awareness, the spider's daily life did not change much in particular. It still lives by eating small animals or cursed beasts now and then.
The one thing slightly different from before, though, was that the spider no longer connected the silk outside the cave to its own tactile sense.
Because there was no particular need to do so.
Even without connecting its tactile sense to the silk, if it stretched out its divine awareness so that it touched the silk it had laid, it could sense a wide range far more precisely and sensitively than before.
So the spider could now observe a radius of several hundred feet without stirring a single step from inside the cave, and if it put cursed energy into the silk it laid down to strengthen it, it could extend that distance much further.
But this much alone was still marginal for use in sensing a strong enemy.
It could detect a range this wide only by sitting still and concentrating its consciousness, and if it did not use its divine awareness deliberately in this way, then ordinarily it barely detected just its own immediate surroundings.
Even so, the more it used its divine awareness, the more it could feel the divine awareness itself growing stronger, however slowly, so the spider simply concentrated on training.
Then, one day it happened.
Something bizarre caught on the senses of the spider, which was spreading its divine awareness from its nest to sense the whole area around it as usual.
No — it was strange even to call it caught. It was closer to say that the divine awareness it had laid out was all at once crushed to pulp and vanished in an instant.
To liken it: the feeling of a boulder the size of a house falling onto a palm-sized web so that the web disappears without a trace?
It was so bizarre that the spider's reaction was actually slow. Before it could even feel terror or dread, some thick pressure was already coiling around the spider.
It was not physical pressure. The spider was still situated inside its safe cave, and there was no intrusion from outside at all.
Even so, the spider felt as though it had entered inside the maw of a gigantic monster. It was as if something unseen had wrapped around its whole body.
Pressure like this it had never once felt before. Even that terrifying jade-hued hawk would be no more than a pitiful little creature before this pressure.
Just then, from outside the cave, the murmuring cries of some animal were heard. It was a cry the spider had never heard in its life. The low, murmuring cries rang out rather regularly and calmly.
Then all of a sudden the spider's field of vision brightened. The reason was simple. The ceiling of the cave the spider was staying in had suddenly been sheared off whole, and had flown far away.
It had been cut away so cleanly that not even dust scattered. Because of that, the spider had its form fully exposed under the bright light of midday.
And above the spider, two furred beasts of some strange appearance were riding side by side on a broad tree leaf, standing bolt upright on two legs, floating loftily in the air.
Those two beasts were, overall, fluttering pure white all over, while their faces and hands and the tips of their feet were somewhat sallow in color.
Long black manes had grown out of their heads; one of them let it hang long down to the waist, and the other had it wound up.
And of the two, the individual with the mane hanging long down was gripping something long and glittering in its hand, aiming it this way.
In fact, such matters of outward appearance hardly mattered. What truly shocked the spider lay elsewhere.
Divine awareness.
From the brows of these bizarre beasts, divine awareness was being given off that was terrifyingly mighty. Though the scale of the divine awareness itself was not so broad, its density was of an altogether different order from the spider's.
And that overwhelming divine awareness had shattered every bit of the divine awareness the spider had spread out beforehand, and was in turn sensing the spider itself.
With the spider before them, so greatly shocked and overwhelmed, the two furred beasts went on with their conversation.
"...I wondered what wretch was hiding and had spread divine awareness in every direction, and its identity turns out to be a cursed fiend. A surprising thing."
"Might it be a cursed fiend that drifted out of the Eight Peaks Forest? Well, whatever the case, Hyung-nim. Since we have found it anyway, let us catch it and take at least the cursed core. By the look of it, small as its bulk is, it has already opened its divine awareness, so it must be Grade 2 at worst."
"Hmm. I wonder. To go out of our way to catch and kill a spider cursed fiend in a spot right at the doorstep of the Eight Peaks Forest.... It feels needlessly ill-omened."
"Tch. Well, if you say so."
Having murmured that much, the two furred beasts soon put the spider out of mind, flew up into the sky, and hid themselves from sight.
It was the moment the spider first encountered furred beasts that walked about on two legs—human cultivators.