The trembling still has not left it.
Looking up at the vast expanse of blue sky through the cave ceiling that had been left gaping open, the spider feels at a loss.
Just what had those two terrifying furred beasts of a moment ago been?
Where had they come from, where had they gone, and how many more of them might there be?
The spider could not know yet. To begin with, it had never even imagined that such beings existed.
Only, as it lay looking up at that vast sky, it suddenly comes to grasp one truth.
This world was vast. Wide and wider still, dizzyingly so.
On this day, the world the spider recognized expanded once. Escaping from inside the narrow, cramped mountain range, it had at last come to cognize the immense world.
***
In any case.
Fortunately for the spider, those bizarre two-legged furred beasts had only blown away the ceiling of the cave the spider lived in, and had done it no further harm beyond that.
Looking back on it, the creatures had shown no sign whatsoever of meaning to hurt the spider. They had merely stared blankly at the spider hiding inside the cave and then departed.
An experience like this was a first for the spider. Though they had clearly been higher predators far stronger than itself, the creatures had let it go.
Perhaps, to those furred beasts, the spider itself was such an insignificant being that they felt it was not even worth eating. In fact, while leaving the mountain range, the spider itself had behaved in a similar way toward small cursed beasts.
In any case, the spider had to deliberate once more.
With the appearance of the two-legged furred beasts, there was no longer any ground to judge that beyond the mountain range was safer than inside the forest.
Quite the reverse: if there were more of those terrifying beasts outside the range, then inside the range where the jade-hued hawk was might well be safer.
In that case.
There would no longer be any reason to maintain a life of privation here, in a place thin even in spiritual energy, while carrying that burden of risk.
In the end there were two options.
To go back west again.
Or to press further east.
Both were choices that carried danger. Only, weighing it in more detail, the jade-hued hawk to the west was an already confirmed threat, while the furred beasts to the east were an uncertain risk factor.
The spider's eyeballs roll round and round and in the end turn east. Not knowing makes one want to know. It is the destiny every conscious living being is endowed with by birth. It was also an expression of the survival instinct, which seeks to raise the survival rate by resolving uncertainty.
It leaves the half-ruined cave. The spider headed east once more.
A while later, the spider arrived at the spiritual energy boundary line it had reached a few weeks earlier. This far was the limit point at which the range's thick spiritual energy exerted its influence, and from beyond here on was a world the spider knew nothing of.
How such terrifying monsters could be born in land this barren, and how they lived there.
And whether, if the spider itself imitated their way of life, it could rise to the same order as them.
It knows nothing yet. So it advances.
The spider's feet advance past the boundary line. But nothing in particular changed right away.
That was to be expected, since this boundary line was merely the spider's own division judged by the concentration of spiritual energy, and in reality it was still nothing more than an ordinary forest thick with undergrowth.
The forest, thin in spiritual energy though it was, overflowed with vitality. All sorts of tiny bugs and insects and small land beasts and birds, all manner of lives, were living and breathing here and there.
Every one of those lives is detected by the spider's divine awareness. Yet the lives that are detected do not even cognize that they have already been caught by the spider.
CHIRP-CHIRP, CHIRP!
The spider shot silk at a small mountain bird that was chattering as it perched on a nearby tree. The mountain bird could not even evade in time and was rolled up in the silk and fell to the ground.
CHOMP!
The spider's fangs bored into the nape of the fallen mountain bird. However much smaller the spider had become, it was still about the size of a decent dog. Having sucked up the mountain bird's fluids in one go, it flings the empty husk aside carelessly.
It fills its hunger by hunting prey in that fashion as suits it. The problem is cursed energy.
For now it sets its course toward conserving cursed energy as much as possible. The one saving grace was that activating its divine awareness did not consume cursed energy in particular. Instead, when it spread its divine awareness over a wide range for a long time, its concentration gradually frayed and its mental strength declined.
And so, while carrying on its exploration and maintaining its divine awareness only to the extent that its concentration was not excessively consumed, the spider suddenly came face to face with a high precipice.
Beyond the thick undergrowth, a sheer cliff dropped some three hundred feet down, and past it the view opened up all at once as far as the distance.
It was the first time it had looked out widely over the ground from a place this high. Its experience up to now amounted at most to climbing a tall tree to spin a web.
The sensation of surveying the ground from a high place is new. The information entering its sight comes rushing in all at once, pleasantly so. It is a sensation completely different from examining the surrounding terrain on the ground. Along with a feeling of liberation, it even feels a strange sense of omnipotence.
Then something odd suddenly came into the spider's view.
Below the cliff, structures of a shape it had never once seen before were gathered close together. And among those structures, small animals were busily coming and going this way and that.
Watching this quietly, the spider was suddenly aghast. The reason was simple.
Those numberless animals coming and going among the structures were every one of them those very two-legged furred beasts! That it had mistaken them for small animals was merely a misapprehension arising from looking down from a dizzying height.
In any case.
The spider had never imagined that those terrifying beasts would be living gathered together in such swarms this close by.
The distance from the mountain range to here was not so far even by the spider's standard.
Still less would such a distance be anything but right at the doorstep for those two-legged beasts, who flew about the sky as they pleased.
So the fact that the spider had spent these past few weeks living so peacefully at the edge of the mountain range must have been nothing short of a miracle.
...And yet.
As it watched a while longer, it began to feel a certain incongruity. The reason was simple. The bearing of these creatures was somehow completely different from that of the two snow-white furred beasts it had seen before.
Though they must surely have the ability to fly freely through the sky, most of the furred beasts merely trudged along on foot. Some furred beasts could be seen riding on the backs of other animals as they traveled, but even that speed hardly looked much different from walking.
Also, however far away they were, it was strange as well that though monsters that terrifying were crowded together in such numbers, no mighty energy whatsoever could be felt.
In the case of the two it had faced earlier, there had been, besides their divine awareness, an immense force of presence radiating from their very existence, whereas now the spider was even feeling as though it were looking at trifling land beasts.
It was a bizarre thing. The spider's thinking turned over. While gauging an answer that could explain the situation, it suddenly arrives at one hypothesis.
However powerful a cursed fiend may be, it is weak while it is young. That was a fact one could see just from the mother weasel and her young.
In that case, perhaps the furred beasts swarming down below were the young of those two from before.
And so the spider's eyeballs roll round and round as it examines the ground.
If it were to eat one of them in secret, would the mother furred beast notice the fact right away?
***
In the end, however, the spider made up its mind not to hunt the young furred beasts. The reason was simple. Because the risk it would have to bear was far too great compared with the gain it could obtain.
If those furred beasts really were nothing-much young, then eating one would bring the spider no real gain.
Whereas if, at that price, a terrifying mother furred beast came to bear a grudge against it, that very day would be the day the spider's life span ran out.
Of course, that is not to say the spider had lost all interest in the young furred beasts.
As it happened, if one went all the way around the right side of the cliff there was a gently sloping path leading down, so the spider used that slope to descend below the cliff.
Having approached that way to near the furred beasts' den, it hid itself quietly among the thick undergrowth near a path the furred beasts often came and went along, and observed them.
Observing at close range like that, the spider confirmed for certain that these furred beasts had no cursed energy and no divine awareness whatsoever. Taking only that part of it, there was nothing much to distinguish them from ordinary land beasts.
But then again, looking closely, the strange points were not one or two.
Murmur, murmur.
Murmur, murmur.
These furred beasts walked about on two legs and constantly made murmuring cries. Usually several of them would gather and murmur together, and now and then an individual wandering alone would make mumbling cries as well.
If that were all it might be one thing, but these beasts also handled all sorts of bizarre objects however they pleased.
In particular, the spider was greatly astonished when it observed that these furred beasts used a large animal and objects of round and square shape to transport loads too heavy for them to lift. Such a notion was high-order thinking that even the spider had never conceived of.
Merely watching these furred beasts quietly felt as though it were developing its own powers of thought. The spider had never imagined that there were animals in the world this 'clever.'
The spider now also came to know that these furred beasts did not have fur of various colors growing on them, but rather draped hides of various colors over their bodies.
That is, it now seemed highly likely that the two furred beasts it had met earlier had not had white fur either, but rather that the hides they draped over themselves were white.
It was bizarre, far too bizarre. Rather than thinking of eating these beasts, the spider was now concentrating more on simply watching them. They were beasts worth that much.
It observes while holding its breath. It was not observation for the sake of an ambush, but observation for the sake of observation. A new change had come about in the spider's behavioral pattern as well.
***
A fair stretch of time had passed since the spider began observing these furred beasts.
From a certain point on, the spider even activated its divine awareness to the maximum as it observed their patterns of behavior in detail, and thanks to that it now understood roughly what these beasts were and, in broad terms, how their society ran.
First of all, these beasts were not anything like the young of the two furred beasts it had encountered before.
Their appearance was merely similar; strictly speaking, they had to be regarded as a different species.
Just as the beasts of the forest divide into cursed beasts that harbor cursed energy and individuals that do not, these furred beasts likewise divided into individuals that possessed a special energy and individuals that did not.
But even so, these beasts possessed a special ability surpassing that of any common cursed beast.
That was 'intelligence.'
These beasts formed a society by means of highly developed intelligence. The murmuring cries were signals for conversation, and they had even assigned special calling signals to each individual and each situation.
For instance, the cry "Gaeddong!" was a signal calling an individual named "Gaeddong," and the cry "Let's eat" meant a meal.
Through the vibrations of such sounds the furred beasts exchanged signals with one another and could carry out high-order exchanges of information, and the spider, sensing the vibrations of the silk it had laid all around by means of its divine awareness, could analyze the sounds on that basis and interpret the beasts' conversations to a certain degree.
But that was all.
These creatures did not have what the spider wanted.
What the spider wanted was the strength to protect itself from powerful predators like the jade-hued hawk, but since these beasts had not even a little cursed energy, there was no meaning in eating them.
Even among the beasts of the forest, cursed beasts equipped with cursed energy were relatively very few in number.
And it seemed that the same held among these furred beasts—humans.
And so, on a certain dark night, the spider quietly left the humans' settlement and went back to the fringes of the mountain range.
Having confirmed that among the humans dwelling in this area there was no special individual capable of threatening its life, it was a conclusion natural enough to be called natural.
Then, while passing its leisurely and peaceful life at the range once more.
One day the spider came face to face with some human near the forest where it lived.
"......Huh?"
That human was a young, small female, with white skin and a small wicker basket in her hand.
Of course, what interested the spider was not such matters of outward appearance.
What drew the spider's gaze was a certain flow of energy wavering between that female's brows—that is, awareness.
It was the moment the spider once again encountered a human who had awakened divine awareness.