by Okina Baba
Of course, they literally look like dolls, so their expressions don’t change or anything.
Still, I can kinda tell somehow.
Using Clairvoyance, I examine the spider inside the puppet and wave a piece of meat back and forth experimentally.
The puppet’s head doesn’t move, but the real body, the spider, shifts back and forth in time with the movements of the meat.
Interesting. You want some, too, huh?
Hmm. Well, we did get left out in the cold together.
I suppose I can be generous enough to share some of my food.
I hold out some meat to the two puppet spiders.
They seem excited, but they don’t reach for it right away, apparently torn.
Maybe they want the meat, but they’re not sure if they should accept a gift from the person they’re supposed to be monitoring?
Come on! I’m trying to be nice here. Take it already.
I push the meat into their hands.
The puppet spiders still remain frozen with uncertainty, so I leave them alone for a while, making a show of eating my own share.
Delicious.
By draining the blood from my kills and being mindful of how I store it, I’ve been able to enjoy meat far tastier than any of the unprocessed stuff I used to eat.
The Demon Lord taught me these techniques.
She’s lived for a long time, so she has a lot of knowledge about all sorts of things.
It had never even occurred to me to drain the blood before, but now that I think about it, that does seem pretty standard.
I used to eat those monsters straightaway, so it’s no wonder they always tasted gross.
Although even with this method, I can’t say the monsters I hunted in the Great Elroe Labyrinth are all that delicious.
Most of them are poisonous, for one thing.
By comparison, the meat of monsters living outside is far tastier.
It’s delicious even without additional processing, so if you take the time to do that, it only gets better!
Draining the blood gets rid of the smell, and if I set up the environment in Spatial Storage to preserve it just right, I can draw out the meat’s best flavors.
All this time, I had been using Spatial Storage’s default settings without customizing anything. In fact, I didn’t even realize that on top of keeping things in a separate dimension, you can actually change the conditions of that dimension.
Since I’m storing stuff in there, it makes sense that sometimes changes are needed.
After learning how to change the temperature, humidity, and other settings to appropriate levels for storing meat, I can slightly cure whatever I put in there!
Only slightly, though.
If you’re not careful with the temperature, the meat can go bad, so don’t expect an amateur like me to do anything too fancy.
Just maintaining Spatial Storage’s settings on anything other than the default is already kind of a pain.
But the results are totally worth it!
My catches are so tasty now, I don’t even want to think about the old stuff!
I’m currently whole roasting some meat over a fire.
Once it’s ready, I grab the cartoony piece of meat by the bone, slather it in seasoning, and dig right in.
Ahhh, this is what it means to treat yourself!
And it cost me a grand total of zero yen.
Cheap, delicious, and plentiful—this grilled meat hits all the right notes!
I wouldn’t want to eat this masterpiece in front of someone on a diet, but right now it’s only two puppet spiders and me.
Plus, it’s not like I have to worry about getting fat.
Cook and eat, cook and eat. I repeat the process over and over.
Finally, unable to simply stand by and watch any longer, one of the puppet spiders starts eating, too.
Right as I’m wondering how exactly it’s going to do that, it unhinges around where its jaw would be, then shoves the hand holding the meat up to the elbow into the puppet’s mouth so that it reaches the spider within.
It’s a little scary to watch, to be honest.
Seeing how its friend has surrendered to the meat’s temptation, the other puppet spider is quick to raise the white flag, too.
This one opens its mouth timidly, then stuffs the meat inside like the other one did.
…Why do I suddenly feel a strange sense of defeat?
Seeing a doll-like creature open its mouth unnaturally wide to shove its own arm into its mouth is surreal, but up until that point, they were actually pretty cute.
Are these things more girlie than I am?
Damn. That’s quite a feat, since they don’t have anything that even remotely points to a specific gender in the first place.
Now that I think about it, they must have been made by the Demon Lord’s Egg-Laying skill, right?
The Egg-Laying skill is essentially asexual reproduction, so it’s more like making inferior clones rather than giving birth to children. I guess they’re probably female like the Demon Lord.
Still, they can use weapons and stuff, plus they can understand and obey the Demon Lord’s orders, so I assume they must be pretty smart.
I shouldn’t have let their appearances fool me. These two are the ideal maidens!
I never expected to lose to them in terms of feminine appeal.
Oh come on! I can’t help it!
I put in some effort whenever I left the house in my old life, but at home I was always just lounging around in whatever was comfortable!
And I wasn’t exactly concerned about my appearance after I was reborn as a spider, so you can’t blame me for being a little behind!
If I wanted to, I could totally look not-half-bad, I bet, maybe!
Okay, so what should I do first?
I chomp away at my meat as I start formulating a plan to be cuter than the dolls in front of me.
Yeah, I’m not gonna win with my table manners, that’s for sure.
Greedily shoving meat into my mouth isn’t exactly cute, and it’s not like I’m going to stop now.
So I just have to win with my appearance!
I look down at myself again.
All I’m wearing is a pathetic scrap of cloth around my chest, like some kind of Neanderthal.
Gah! I mean, I might be able to go the sexy route with this, but if I’m not careful, I’m just gonna end up flashing someone by mistake!
I gotta do something about this, and fast!
Gobbling up the rest of the meat, I quickly clean things up.
The puppet spiders have finished eating the meat I gave them, too.
I wasn’t sure if one piece would be enough for them, but I guess the spiders themselves are only about the size of my palm. They probably can’t eat that much.
If anything, I guess the real surprise is that they managed to polish off chunks of meat the size of their own bodies.
Must be nice, being small enough that you don’t need to gather much food.
Forget “bigger is better.” These days, it’s all about miniaturization.
Hmm…? But didn’t I used to eat a lot even before I evolved, back when I was smaller?
Forget it. Not worth thinking about.
Gotta leave that all behind and move on to the next plan.
Namely: making myself some clothes!
I produce some thread and use Thread Control to weave it into cloth, using my human hands to cut it into the shape of clothing.
Normally, you wouldn’t be able to do this kind of thing without tools, but this material is thread I made myself.
With Thread Control, I can shape it however I want.
Plus, I’ve maxed out the Divine Thread Weaving skill.
That means making clothes is a piece of cake!
In fact, I could probably break into the fashion industry with skills like this.
Mother even used this skill to give her thread camouflage that blended in perfectly with the labyrinth w
alls and floor, if I remember correctly.
Now I’m using that incredibly grand skill to create a single piece of clothing.
Talk about a waste of talent.
Anyway, once I’m done wasting that talent to make my clothes, they’ll be way better than any old scrap of fabric.
In no time at all, I’ve completed a simple one-piece dress.
It’s white, without much in the way of frills or decorations.
Sticking with the KISS principle, I kept the sleeves and waist tapered while leaving the bust loose enough that it won’t emphasize my chest too much.
Pretty impressive work, if I do say so myself.
I also pumped in SP and MP while I worked, giving it more defensive power than the design might suggest.
Maybe that’s why it has a certain mystical air about it.
Anyway, I try it on right away and promptly show it off to the puppet spiders, who applaud with all six of their hands.
I know, pretty impressive, right?
That’s right—keep it coming. I enjoy praise.
I get the feeling they’re applauding how quickly I made the dress rather than complimenting how I look wearing it, but whatever!
They’re staring at my clothes in clear admiration, so it’s all good.
I keep posing for a while, but one of them is starting to look fidgety.
It’s the one who ate the meat first.
Then, unable to resist any longer, it starts imitating me to make clothes of its own.
The other one watches on hesitantly for a bit, then starts doing the same thing.
Despite being of the same make and model, they seem to have different personalities. The one who started first is definitely more proactive.
The two puppet spiders keep making clothes, but their work’s going a lot more slowly than mine did.
Their real bodies might just be palm-size spiders, but since they use their thread to manipulate the puppet from within, their thread-related skills are up there.
Still, they haven’t reached Divine Thread Weaving just yet, so their abilities fall short of mine.
Thinking it might help them out a little, I start making another piece of clothing. This time, though, I do it slowly enough for them to follow along more easily.
Since the puppet spiders have six arms, I choose a design without sleeves this time.
Slowly, with occasional help from me, the puppets embark on their own fashion journey.
Eventually, rather late into the night, they wrap up.
With obvious excitement, the puppet spiders try on the clothes that took so long to make.
Well, shoot.
They’re still just mannequins, but wearing clothes makes them immediately cuter.
After adding a dress to their genderless bodies, they’re perfectly ladylike now.
What is going on?!
I thought clothes just made the person wearing them look better.
For someone who already looks good, what they wear wouldn’t make that much of a difference.
But now I see how wrong I was.
Those lifeless-looking mannequins have been totally transformed by putting on clothes!
Maybe I was too dismissive of clothes and fashion as a whole.
But now that we’ve come this far, it makes me want to fiddle around even more.
Sure, putting clothes on them changed their overall impression quite a bit, but they’re still mannequins.
As things stand, at best they resemble a display in the window of some department store.
But wait just a damn minute!
If simply adding clothes changed them this much, couldn’t we make them even cuter and more feminine with some more adjustments?
I want to test my theory.
No idea why, but I’m super into this idea.
And there’s no time like the present.
Luckily, the puppet spiders and I all have Status Condition Nullification.
It’s an evolution of the Exhaustion Nullification skill, which means we can get by on zero sleep without a problem.
Our night is just getting started!
“Well, that’s weird. Did we always have this many cuties in our party?”
The Demon Lord is the first to speak when the others return from the village.
The baby bloodsucker, too, is staring in bemused wonder.
Only Mera, holding the baby, looks relatively indifferent.
I’m a little disappointed at his lack of reaction, but it was all worth it to see the Demon Lord looking completely flabbergasted.
Of course, she’s talking about the puppet spiders.
They’ve transformed overnight to the point of being nearly unrecognizable.
In addition to their new clothes, they’ve got cute hairstyles now, and their new lifelike faces help them seem more human.
The hair is actually thread made to replicate the look and feel of real hair, which I mass-produced and affixed to their heads.
That was the easy part. It was everything else that really gave me trouble.
If I wanted to take it any further, I would have to rebuild their very bodies.
I mean, their puppet bodies are clearly just that: puppets.
To make them more feminine, I would have to do some touch-ups on their figures.
That sure as hell stumped me, let me tell you.
But that didn’t stop me, and when I carefully Appraised the puppet spiders’ mannequins, I realized that the puppets themselves are constructed from thread.
I had assumed that it was wood or something, but it turned out to be layers of super-fine thread wound together, hardened, then shaped into parts before finally being connected together to form the puppet spiders’ bodies.
Man, thread is amazing.
And if the puppet bodies are made out of thread, that opens up a world of possibilities, right?
I mean, I’ve got the super-pro Divine Thread Weaving skill.
There’s practically nothing I can’t do with this stuff!
So, after a ton of trial and error, I managed to create thread that comes insanely close to the feel of human skin.
I mean, all matter in the world is a bunch of atoms lined up in a particular way.
From that perspective, it should be possible to replicate just about any matter with thread.
And since Divine Thread Weaving allows me to create and manipulate thread however I want, theoretically, I have the ability to re-create any substance.
Thus, by twisting this rather dubious theory and forcing my way through, I managed to accomplish my goal.
Now that I’ve done it, I can’t exactly take it back.
Thread really is amazing.
Once it was finished, I also stuck some of the skin-like cloth over their faces and attached some facial features while I was at it to make them look extra human.
Still, they’re far from perfect.
Their noses don’t actually have nostrils, and their eyes are basically glassy balls that I developed while trying to make skin out of thread.
And I can’t get the lips right at all. I have a long way to go on the details.
Plus, their skin might feel like a human’s at first, but since it’s really just stuck on the surface, pressing too hard makes it very obvious it’s not real.
If I want to improve that, I would have to literally create new bodies from scratch, redoing everything that should be under the skin.
But if all I do is dwell on minor imperfections, there’ll be no end to it.
What’s important is how pretty the puppet spiders are now!
It’s obvious from the Demon Lord’s and baby bloodsucker’s expressions that my efforts were a huge success!
These puppets are still a far cry from passing for human, but it’s a considerable improvement from the textbook mannequins they were before.
Now they’ve been upgraded to ball-jointed dolls.
Pretty damn impressive, if I do say so myself.
�
�Hmm?
Wait a second?
They’re all so focused on the puppet spiders that they haven’t noticed my new dress?
That’s strange.
Is it just me, or did my plan to make myself cuter morph into an elaborate project to help the puppet spiders look better instead?
I don’t get it.
Argh! What’s going on here?!
It’s all because those stupid puppet spiders are so cute!
But the moment I turn to glare at them, I find them already gazing at me with respectful admiration.
Somehow, it’s almost as if those glass eyes of theirs are sparkling.
H-how am I supposed to stay mad at you if you look at me like that?
Argh… How did this happen?
Unreal.
THE OLD MAN SEEKS AN APPRENTICESHIP
“What in the world?!”
Arriving via Teleport in the Great Elroe Labyrinth, I am greeted by an astonishing sight.
This is the very same place where that great being destroyed my squad.
The large cavern, which the guide said connects to the Middle Stratum, is crawling with an innumerable amount of creatures.
A swarm of white spiders as far as the eye can see.
They vary greatly in size, both large and small.
The smallest could likely fit in the palm of a human’s hand, but even the largest aren’t quite tall enough to reach my waist.
These large ones are just about the same size as a young taratect might be.
Indeed, the monsters bear a strong resemblance to taratects but with one major difference: Their two front legs are shaped like scythes.
They are the spitting image of the master of magic.
But while they may be similar in appearance, the power of these monsters pales in comparison.
Their size appears to directly correspond to their strength; the smallest ones seem so weak that I could likely crush them beneath my foot without resistance.
The large ones, however, are decently strong. The power I sense from them is enough that a greenhorn adventurer would likely struggle to defeat even one.
I can scarcely begin to count how many of them are crowded in here.
There must be hundreds at the very least.
Not only that, but their numbers are still increasing.
Countless small, round objects are scattered on the floor, and it almost seems as if the endless tide of spiders is protecting them.