As always, the spider had been hidden in the undergrowth, spreading its divine awareness through the surroundings.
Then a single small human was detected by the spider's divine awareness with unusual clarity.
In fact this sort of thing was hardly a first in itself.
The humans below the cliff would occasionally come this far up the mountain range and now and then cut wood or hunt mountain animals, and in the course of that, rarely, they would even come within the area the spider sensed with its divine awareness.
So the spider simply paid it no particular mind.
On the basis of its observations so far, the spider knew that humans' sensing ability was inferior even to that of most trifling land beasts.
So it reckoned that as long as it stayed hidden in the shade well enough, there would be no getting found out.
And so it left the human alone and went on concentrating solely on training its divine awareness.
And yet this small human kept edging closer and closer toward where the spider was, until at last she stuck her head out right over the undergrowth the spider was hiding in.
"......Huh? It's a spider."
And so the gazes of the spider and the girl met, and the spider confirmed that divine awareness like its own was flowing out from between the girl's brows.
But the girl's divine awareness was feeble beyond compare. Set against the two white-robed cultivators it had met before, it was like comparing the sun to a firefly, and even set against the spider itself it was of a trifling level.
But in any case the girl had opened her divine awareness, and she had even used that divine awareness to find the hidden spider.
In a situation like this, how should it respond?
The spider rose from its place with a rustle. It unfolded the legs it had kept drawn in and raised its body upright.
Then, after gathering the divine awareness it had spread in every direction back into one place, it tried stretching it out toward the girl.
The spider's divine awareness, stretching out that way, touched the girl's brows. Then an uncannily vivid image was caught in the spider's mind.
The spider's divine awareness had sensed the girl's divine awareness.
Only now does the spider understand the situation from when it encountered the white-robed cultivators the other day.
Divine awareness could cognize other divine awareness. Just as a cursed beast possessing cursed energy can recognize another cursed beast, beings that had awakened divine awareness could cognize one another.
So the white-robed cultivators the other day had been able to see the spider's divine awareness spread all around and thereby find even the cave the spider was hiding in.
That the girl had been detected with unusual clarity in the divine awareness it had spread earlier also seemed to be because the girl possessed divine awareness.
In any case, it had resolved one of the questions it had been holding. And that much was enough for the spider. The spider drew the divine awareness it had stretched out back into its brain stem and stared at the girl.
What to do?
Eating her would not be bad either. The spider now understands that divine awareness and cursed energy are separate things. Cursed energy is the power that makes a cursed beast strong. Divine awareness, by contrast, was an ability purely related to sensing.
And from the human before it, not a bit of cursed energy could be felt; only feeble divine awareness was detected.
Moreover, a human is a frail beast without weapons like the sharp teeth or claws of the common beasts, so if the spider set its mind to attacking, she would be eaten in an instant without even resisting.
Then the spider could fill its hunger, and at the same time it could also verify whether divine awareness, like cursed energy, can be obtained by eating an opponent.
The judgment is finished in an instant. The spider gathered cursed energy at its rear. If it fired silk laced with venom, the hunt would be as good as over then and there.
But in that moment.
The girl reached out her hand toward the spider first. And then she gently stroked the spider's head.
In fact it was not a particularly fast motion, so had the spider set its mind to it, it could have fired poison silk before the girl's hand ever reached its head.
The reason the spider nevertheless let the girl's hand stroke its head was simple.
It was just curious.
The fact was that while observing the humans below the cliff before, the spider had witnessed a number of exceedingly bizarre situations.
Of course, the occasions on which human wisdom astonished the spider were not just one or two, but such things were, at bottom, cases where the spider was astonished at realizing through the humans some notion it had not conceived of until then.
That is, those were astonishments grounded in understanding.
But there were exceptions as well.
Humans also readily did things whose reasons the spider could not possibly work out, and one of those was 'stroking.'
According to what the spider had observed, humans kept other beasts besides their own kind within their group.
Dogs and cattle and horses, for instance, were the representative examples of such beasts, and the spider could not quite accept how such different species could get along so intimately.
In particular, whenever a human reached out a hand and stroked a beast, that beast would bare its belly and even close its eyes as it enjoyed the sensation, and that had struck the spider as quite puzzling.
So it let the girl stroke its head. And the result was astonishing.
'......?'
This sensation was one it had not had even once across the whole of the spider's lives. It was soft, and warm, and affectionate. Only upon feeling that touch does the spider grasp the truth.
It was not that humans lacked weapons like the sharp teeth or claws of the common beasts.
Rather, this very touch could be called the most powerful weapon humans possessed.
They give pleasure to another and so make it their subordinate. Only now could the spider understand why beasts like dogs and cattle and horses obey as the humans direct them.
***
In any case.
That day it ended with that.
The girl merely stroked the spider three or four times and then simply left, and the spider did not go out of its way to follow her either.
Only, from then on the spider kept loitering near the undergrowth where it had met the girl, waiting for the girl to appear again, and when the girl came back a few days later, the spider, unlike before, sensed the girl first with its divine awareness and hurried out to her.
"Ah!"
At first the girl seemed a little startled, but she soon recognized it as the spider cursed fiend she had met the other day. The spider approached the girl hesitantly, and the girl stroked the spider's head once again.
The spider crouched down and quietly gave its back and head over to the girl's touch.
Something like that repeated several more times. Now the girl came to find the spider almost every day and played with it, and the spider likewise waited for the times when the girl would appear.
Then one day.
The girl was detected by the spider's divine awareness. But this time it was not only the girl.
There were three more humans nearby. The three humans seemed to be following stealthily behind the girl.
Judging by how their images were caught more faintly than the girl's, they did not seem to be individuals who had opened their divine awareness.
Since the situation was somewhat different from usual, instead of going out to meet the girl as it normally did, the spider climbed a nearby tree and hid itself.
A short while later the girl arrived at the place where she always met the spider. But when she looked around and there was no spider, she wore a slightly disappointed expression.
She plopped down on a nearby rock as suited her and took a quick look inside the basket she had brought.
Ordinarily the basket always held freshly dug medicinal herbs, but lately the amount had dwindled. That was because she had spent the time she should have been digging herbs playing with the spider.
Of course, even when the girl idled like this the old man never scolded her, but inwardly the girl feels guilty.
Having sat on the rock a while like that, the girl soon steadies her resolve and rises from her place. She decides that today she will not play with the spider but go and finish digging the herbs.
Just then, a rustling sound came from beyond the undergrowth. Thinking the spider had come, the girl smiled brightly and turned that way.
"Heh heh heh."
It was not the spider. Three vagrants of filthy appearance approached the girl, leering. They were all faces the girl had never seen. They were not residents of the nearby village. They were plainly outsiders.
The vagrants each drew short blades and the like from inside their clothes and stepped toward the girl threateningly. The girl screamed in terror, and taking that as their cue the vagrants all rushed at the girl at once.
FSST! FSST! FSST!
Something flew in with a wet slap from behind the vagrants. With a HISSSS, the something that had flown in melted the vagrants' skin and burned.
"GAAAH!"
It was none other than poison silk the spider had fired. For ordinary humans, who did not even possess cursed energy, enduring the spider's venom was out of the question.
As the vagrants shrieked in agony and rolled on the ground, the spider rushed at them. It thrust out its venom-fangs and bit their napes. When thick venom was injected directly into their blood vessels, the men's movements stiffened in an instant and they expired then and there.
The girl was still terrified. She seemed unable to collect herself amid the sudden turn of events. The spider approached the girl slowly. Trembling all over, the girl nevertheless understood the fact that the spider had saved her.
The girl set down her basket and reached out both hands to take hold of the spider. Then, with trembling hands, she held the spider to her chest and rose from her place. The spider stayed obediently in the girl's arms, and in that state the girl hurried flusteredly home.
The girl's house was located not in the village but in a somewhat isolated spot at the edge of the forest.
There was a shabby old man there with a bent back.
The old man listened quietly to the girl as she sobbed and babbled about something, then looked with an indifferent gaze at the spider she was still holding to her chest.
"A cursed beast, is it? It kept faith, so it is a beast that knows propriety."
Then the old man rose from his place. Apart from his back being grotesquely bent, his movements were oddly light and disciplined.
The old man led the way back to the scene. The vagrants' corpses still lay strewn about the scene.
With a light tsk, the old man drew a peculiarly shaped rod made of wood from inside his clothes.
Then he scattered some transparently glittering things into the air. And then an astonishing thing happened.
CLACK, CLACK, CLACK!
The corpses, which had surely expired, suddenly hauled themselves half upright and began to move briskly of their own accord.
Unable to understand this bizarre situation, the spider exercised its divine awareness and examined it more closely.
Then transparent threads connected to the corpses' limbs were detected by its divine awareness.
Those threads were being pulled taut at times and slackened at others, drawn and released to move the corpses' limbs, and at their ends the rod the old man held in his hand was connected.
Each time the old man twitched his hand lightly, that motion flowed along the threads to the corpses and moved their bodies. The technique of making three corpses live and move soundly by nothing but such light gestures of the hand was truly astonishing beyond compare.
The old man himself, however, was merely nonchalant, since exercising puppet arts to this degree was no more than a trifle to him.
Puppet Master Gok Jun.
He had once been a villainous fiend who spread his infamy through the jianghu as a first-rate assassin, but one day he vanished without a trace, and that was the old man's identity.
The spider, of course, had no means of knowing such things, and in fact they were not important either.
It merely observes and watches closely the energy of unknown identity that flows along the threads each time the old man gestures, and the phenomena that arise from that energy.
The threads are pulled taut, then released, then pulled again, transmitting force. That repeated motion enthralls the spider.
It realizes instinctively. That thing, that technique — might it not be the very path the spider itself must walk?
The spider quietly drew out thread from its rear. The fine thread was thin enough to snap at a breath of wind, yet in fact cursed energy dwelt in it, making it tough and strong.
That thread fluttered and touched a broken tree branch nearby. The branch dangled this way and that, hanging from the silk.
After it had swung back and forth meaninglessly for a long while, the branch suddenly rotated cleanly, one full turn around.
The spider's eyeballs roll round and round as well, following that rotation.
That rotation a moment ago had been intended by the spider, and it had been performed perfectly.
Next the spider cut off the thread swaying from its rear and attached it to a foreleg. Then, after producing a few more strands of the same thread, it joined its own legs to the branch with those threads.
And so it tries controlling the branch with eight strands of thread.
The branch dangling in the air rotates this way and that and finally stops with no motion at all. And that though the spider's own body, from which those threads hang, is still held in the girl's arms and swaying this way and that.
Stillness and motion.
Motion and stillness.
To realize the movement of something means to control not only its movement but its stopping as well.
Though no one had taught it, it was the moment the spider grasped the fundamental principle of puppet arts.