The Giant Spider
Guided by Deoji, the Red Labor Investigation Squad arrived at a mountain beside Ungyu Sect.
It was a small, nameless peak on the edge of the continent—so unremarkable, in fact, that no one had ever bothered to give it a proper title.
And yet it was packed with every sort of monster and strange beast imaginable. Maybe Monster Mountain was a fitting name after all.
Hmm. Monster Mountain does sound kind of cool.
In truth, the reason so many monsters had gathered there was not simply that the mountain lay on the outskirts, where animals were almost never disturbed by human interference. It was also because the cultivators of Ungyu Sect were training on the neighboring mountain.
The animals here had grown fat on the spiritual power the cultivators unconsciously leaked, as well as on the qi of the spirit veins—one of the sources of earth energy flowing beneath the land.
With no desperate cultivators around trying to nip every budding monster in the bud, the population had naturally multiplied.
“Senior Baek, doesn’t something feel strange?”
“Huh?”
Baek Sang-ah was riding on Rangi’s back, marveling at the jolting mountain path, when Hyeongeuk spoke with a dark expression.
“It’s just... somehow, it feels like those beasts are staring at us.”
At Hyeongeuk’s cautious remark, Baek Sang-ah turned her head this way and that, looking around.
He was right. Animals had gathered all around them in numbers that were downright uncanny.
If it had ended there, she might have assumed they were merely curious because humans had entered the mountain.
But there was a strange intent in those gazes.
Not outright killing intent, but an unnervingly strong wariness. A faint hostility seeped out from between them, and some of them were openly glaring at Baek Sang-ah’s group.
“Hyeongeuk. Did you do something bad?”
“Pardon? No, no. Certainly not. Ungyu Sect doesn’t even interfere with this mountain.”
“Then did Rangi do it?”
“Grr?”
Rangi shook her head furiously, looking wronged.
“Then do you know anything? Rangi, you were the king of this mountain, weren’t you?”
Even at Baek Sang-ah’s question, Rangi just looked blank.
To begin with, it would have been stranger if she had known anything.
For the past ten years or so, hadn’t Rangi been sharing life and death with Baek Sang-ah in the cave where toushan was practiced?
In the animal world, ten years was enough time for a leader to change dozens of times over.
So Rangi was now little more than a monster with no real connection to this mountain.
“I didn’t do anything either.”
While Baek Sang-ah finished her brief, shallow bout of thinking, they soon arrived where the mole labor party member was said to have disappeared.
The hole in the middle of the mountainside, torn open between grass and soil, was clear evidence that there had once been a mole monster here.
“Here?”
“Nng!”
“Good. Let’s find the labor party member. Hyeongeuk, you’re a revolutionary of the labor union too, so you have to help.”
“Of course. I, too, have become rather well acquainted with the mole monsters while helping raise the buildings of Ungyu Sect.”
“So Hyeongeuk is close with monsters.”
Baek Sang-ah hopped down from Rangi’s back and poked her head into the hole.
She sniffed with a shark’s instinct, feeling the vibrations in the tunnel beyond.
As expected, she didn’t sense anything except the aura of dirt.
“Do you sense anything?”
Hyeongeuk averted his eyes from Baek Sang-ah.
With her knees on the ground, one hand braced against the earth and her head thrust into the hole, her rear was raised high.
Her thick tail dangled down, covering half of it, but that only made her skirt ride up more, leaving him with nowhere to look.
Whether he knew Hyeongeuk’s eyes were wavering in real time or not, Baek Sang-ah answered.
“Something’s there.”
When she still couldn’t feel anything through her nose, she used her eyes to inspect the surroundings instead.
Then, at the end of the pit, she saw three deep claw marks gouged into the wall. Something had clearly struggled here.
“There are traces of the mole labor party member.”
Next, she connected her awareness to the earth. If someone had been able to snatch a mole monster away, then it wasn’t something an ordinary beast could have done.
It had to be a stronger monster at the very least.
Monsters always left some trace of their own energy behind, and for a cultivator at the Foundation Establishment Realm, it was possible to make out those traces, faintly though they might be.
The moment Baek Sang-ah’s consciousness touched the flow of the earth, her brows twitched.
It’s not a cultivator’s energy.
By Baek Sang-ah’s own rough way of describing it, the energy was something peculiar—like green liquid bubbling in a cauldron, with strands of hair and giant octopus legs floating on top.
[[That unrefined, rampaging energy resembles that of a monster that has failed to become a beastfolk and yet could not remain a beast either.]]
At Muyeonja’s words, Baek Sang-ah narrowed her eyes.
“Phew!”
Baek Sang-ah pulled her hand from the earth and straightened up.
There was dirt dusting the tip of her nose, along with a faint, viscous trace of energy.
“May I ask what you discovered, senior?”
“Yeah. I don’t think this is a disappearance.”
“Then...?”
“I think a monster took the labor party comrade away.”
Hyeongeuk asked with a flustered face. “A monster?”
“Yeah. Not a beast, and not a monster either. Muyeonja said it couldn’t become beastfolk.”
“You mean a demon beast.”
“Yeah, a demon beast. You looked like you didn’t know, so I told you. You should be grateful.”
“Th-thank you....”
“Nng, nngg.”
At that, Deoji looked up at Baek Sang-ah with frightened, worried eyes.
Baek Sang-ah set Deoji back on her shoulder, then climbed onto Rangi’s back again.
“Rangi can find them.”
Hyeongeuk lacked the strength to climb onto Rangi’s huge back, so he had to grab Baek Sang-ah’s plump, solid tail and haul himself up.
“Lady Rangi can?”
“Yeah. Rangi trained with me too.”
“No wonder she seemed twice as imposing as she did before....”
Rangi’s broad shoulders moved smoothly as she started along the mountain path.
Deoji clung tightly to her shoulder so he wouldn’t be blown off, whimpering in protest.
“Could this have something to do with the beasts glaring at us?”
“Wouldn’t it definitely be a strange occurrence?”
“Maybe it’s because of you.”
“Huh?”
“You’re human.”
Hyeongeuk was momentarily speechless.
Come to think of it, among the Red Labor Investigation Squad, he alone was a cultivator of human origin.
Baek Sang-ah had once been a great white shark, Rangi had been a tiger, and Deoji was a mole.
“Still, we’re all labor comrades, so it’s fine.”
“Ah, y-yes....”
Rangi ran without hesitation.
Monster Mountain had once been her domain, so she knew the lay of the land as well as the back of her paw.
That was why she ran with her eyes closed.
Thanks to the cultivation methods of toushan, she could now sense the surroundings through her consciousness, making it possible.
“Kheung!”
But somehow, the higher Rangi climbed, the stranger things became.
At first, a huge hole had been dug in the brush along the path, like a trap, and Rangi’s foot had fallen right in.
Then vine-woven ropes had snapped around her ankles, but her legs were as thick as Ungyu Sect’s pillars, so she hadn’t even stumbled.
“That must mean we’re going the right way.”
“Huh? Why?”
“Well, traps keep appearing as if they’re trying to stop Lady Rangi, don’t they? If you think about it the other way around, that means we’re getting closer.”
Baek Sang-ah let out a sound of admiration at Hyeongeuk’s deduction.
“Smart.”
“It’s a basic matter, isn’t it?”
After Rangi broke through dozens of traps, they finally arrived at the entrance to a cave deep in Monster Mountain.
A cave so large that even Rangi could enter it.
Inside, a bubbling, gurgling sort of energy seeped out.
“Kheung!”
“It’s here.”
Perhaps because of the demon-beast energy wafting from within, Baek Sang-ah’s tail swayed differently than usual.
It was an instinctive rejection; to Baek Sang-ah, a white-haired little shark who had grown only on the pure qi of proper immortals, such murky demonic energy was no different from moldy fish.
“This is no ordinary place.”
“No, it really isn’t.”
There was no way they could enter the cave while riding on Rangi’s back, so Baek Sang-ah leaped down to the ground and led the way inside.
A rank smell of mildew and damp air burst out from deeper within.
“Chilling.”
“Yeah. What do you sense?”
“No, I still can’t.... I just feel that something enormous is in here.”
Baek Sang-ah strode onward without hesitation.
There was nothing for the greatest great white shark, the king of the sea, to fear.
The deeper they went into the cave, the more darkness pressed in. As the demonic energy inside grew stronger, Deoji trembled nonstop.
It was instinctive, a reaction to the threat of death.
“This is...?”
While following the trail of energy, Baek Sang-ah suddenly felt that something was off and rubbed her cheek with her hand.
Something white and sticky clung to her fingers.
Baek Sang-ah held it out to Hyeongeuk.
“Wh-what is this?”
“I can feel demonic energy from here.”
Hyeongeuk narrowed his eyes. The substance on her fingertip clearly looked like sticky thread.
It was viscous, damp, and thickly mingled with organic matter, like a clump of mucus.
“It’s spider silk!”
“Oh?”
Baek Sang-ah’s brows shot up.
The spider silk on her hand was so large it covered half her palm.
“We need to go deeper first.”
Why was there such enormous spider silk here?
After barely shaking it off, Baek Sang-ah quickened her pace, curiosity pulling her deeper inside.
A little while later, she felt her shoulder go light.
“D-Deoji?”
The mole comrade had vanished from her shoulder.
But when Baek Sang-ah turned to mention it to Hyeongeuk, he was gone too.
“Where did they all go?”
“Grr?”
In the end, only Rangi and she remained.
One by one, her comrades were disappearing. A cold wind seemed to sweep in from somewhere.
Baek Sang-ah’s eyes flashed in the dark.
“Kheung!”
Crash!
Then, all of a sudden, Rangi slammed one massive forepaw into the cave wall.
Wondering what had happened, Baek Sang-ah looked up and saw a faint shadow there.
Something was there.
“Who’s there?”
Baek Sang-ah tilted her head.
Faintly, so faintly.
High up on the cave ceiling, where the darkness was too deep to make out a shape and could only be sensed as a presence.
It felt almost like something was watching her while holding its breath.
“I need light.”
Through the subtle workings of the five elements, Baek Sang-ah clenched her fist and ignited a flame.
“It’s the Fire Fist. Even shark friends I know can learn it. It’s not a water attribute, though.”
It was only a simple fire art, nothing more than making a flame. Yet once the blaze took shape, the inside of the cave became fully visible.
Baek Sang-ah’s pupils widened, and she could only gasp.
Spider silk, and more spider silk.
The cave was wrapped from end to end in webbing.
“Mmph, mmph!”
“A sound?”
At the noise coming from somewhere, Baek Sang-ah snapped her head around.
“Mmph, mmph!”
What she saw there was Hyeongeuk and Deoji, both wrapped tightly in spider silk.
And the mole comrade, bound in webbing and hanging limply, drained of strength.
Clang, clang!
Another strange sound echoed through the cave.
“Shaaah!”
“Kraaaah?”
At the disgusting cry, Baek Sang-ah instinctively let out the roar of the greatest great white shark.
And then—
Thunk!
A giant shadow dropped down before her.
“How dare... humans... little birds... rats... things like you... come crawling in here—!”
It was a spider.
Not just any spider.
It had eight legs, and they gleamed like steel, reflecting the light of the flame burning in Baek Sang-ah’s fist.
Its lower half was sturdy, but from the waist up, the shadow shrank.
The reason was simple.
“I-it’s naked.”
The lower body was unmistakably that of a spider, but from the waist upward, it belonged not to a spider, but to a human.
That was a demon beast.