Chapter 129: Heavenly Silkworm (3)
Translator: bjgoofy
There had been a brief commotion, but once the Divine Thief began dividing up the gold nuggets, most of the sericulture artisans agreed to take their share of the compensation and head back.
However, a few refused to return: an old man named Baek and two other artisans.
The moment they laid eyes on Yohwa's thread, they fell into something like a trance, turning down even the gold and pleading with me desperately.
"You want to weave silk from this?"
"Yes! In the thread you showed us, young hero, we saw the finest silk imaginable!"
"No, the finest thread would be the Heavenly Silkworm Thread over there...."
"Heavenly Silkworm Thread is far too rigid, and weaving it into fabric requires Internal Energy. That's absolutely impossible for ordinary people like us.
Making it into any other kind of garment would be no simple task either.
What's more, Heavenly Silkworm Thread lacks luster, so even if you could weave it, the result would resemble cotton cloth more than silk. But...."
I had actually wondered what would happen if, instead of Yohwa's rough weaving, someone properly wove fabric from her thread, so the proposal from the three of them was naturally a welcome one.
Still, I needed permission from the family elders, so I was hesitating to give an answer.
Then came a voice brimming with resolve.
"...The thread you showed us, young hero, stretches softly yet holds firm, and its luster surpasses any thread I have ever seen. It is a thread capable of producing the finest silk!
Fifty years as a sericulture artisan! Having encountered such thread, if I were to die without weaving it into cloth, this old Baek would never be able to close his eyes, not even in the afterlife!"
"He's right! We don't even need wages! Please, just let us weave it! Young hero!"
'What is with these people, acting like they've lost their minds over silk.... Wait! Could it be!? Is, is that it? Is that what this is!?'
I had been thinking, What on earth is wrong with these people, volunteering to be slaves over some fabric? But what I glimpsed in their blazing eyes was the soul of a fanatic, the very same one that lived inside me.
If someone dangled an irresistible venomous creature in front of me, wouldn't I look exactly the same?
Please, let me have one. Please.
No, I'll be your slave if you just let me raise it.
It overlapped, just a little, with the image of myself, a man who had married into the Tang Family for the chance to rear venomous creatures.
In my previous life, whenever I heard a new species had come in, I used to bolt out in the middle of a livestream just to go secure one.
On top of that, there was the lizard from Africa that arrived for the first time. I had missed the pre-order by a hair and, on the day the import shipment landed, went to the shop and begged them to at least let me hold it once.
The ultimate destination of every obsession is making something yourself.
I had aspired to breed lizards with all sorts of patterns, so I could understand their desperation perfectly.
If I was a venomous creature fanatic, those three artisans were silk fanatics.
'Every fanatic in the world respects and supports the passions of other fanatics.'
I called to mind that unspoken rule of the fandom world and nodded.
Respect for hobbies, after all.
And so I raised my thumb toward them.
"Wh-what does that mean?"
The three of them blinked at my thumb.
I winked at them and answered.
"It means I respect your passion, no, your resolve."
"Th-then!?"
"Sure, why not! But in return, you'd better weave me the most beautiful, most magnificent silk in the world!"
"Of course! Young hero! This old Baek swears on his life to create the greatest masterpiece!"
"Thank you! Young hero!"
When I brought the three artisans back to the estate, the family elders stared at me with surprised expressions.
'Did I mess up?'
"Soryong brought sericulture artisans?"
"Yes, they said they wanted to try weaving silk from Yohwa's thread. Would that... be all right?"
I had talked big and brought them along, but the fact remained that I had done so without a word of prior notice.
The elders' reactions were unreadable, and the artisans were still waiting outside, so I worried I might be humiliatingly turned away. But what followed, unexpectedly, was praise.
"Is that so? This boy, I tell you. He's a real blessing."
"My, sericulture artisans? Aren't they terribly hard to come by?"
"That's right, dear. Finding skilled artisans is an incredibly difficult thing. Well done! I thought our son-in-law's only talent was catching venomous creatures, but it turns out he's rather good at catching people too!"
Silk production was a lucrative business with exports and everything, so finding sericulture artisans was apparently no easy feat.
The only concern was that these were artisans the Divine Thief had stolen away, essentially stolen goods, but when I brought it up, they said that was the artisans' own affair to sort out.
"The hard part is finding artisans willing to relocate. If they themselves say they want to stay with our Tang Family, don't worry about it, son-in-law."
"Is that so?"
"Of course. We simply negotiate with wherever they belonged before."
With my father-in-law's permission secured, I decided to introduce the three artisans to Yohwa right away.
Since they would be working together, I wanted to let them get acquainted with her.
"First, you mustn't be alarmed. The thread, you see, doesn't actually come from a silkworm."
"Pardon? Not from a silkworm? Then what?"
As we left the Family Head's Hall and headed toward the well, the three artisans blinked when I told them the thread did not come from silkworms.
"Yohwa!"
-Thud!
When I called up into the tree by the well, Yohwa leaped down right in front of me.
"Eeeeek!"
"A-a sp-spider!"
"Th-there's a sp-spider on a person's body! A, a monster!?"
The artisans shrieked at the sight of Hwa-eun on Yohwa's body as she hopped down.
I stroked Yohwa's head as if to say there was nothing to worry about.
"There's no need to be alarmed. Yohwa is what's called a Human-Faced Spider, a spider that can take on a human form like this. She understands human speech perfectly, and as long as you don't threaten her, she won't harm anyone.
And she can produce as much thread as you want, whenever you want it."
That was when I finished my explanation, or rather, my introduction of Yohwa.
The three artisans stood frozen in a daze.
I assumed they were still in shock, but what struck me as odd was that all three of their gazes were locked on a single point.
I followed the direction of their blank stares, and there it was: Yohwa's pedipalp ankle, transformed to look like Hwa-eun's.
More precisely, it was the red thread tied around Yohwa's ankle.
'Why are they staring at the thread?'
A moment later, their eyes began darting back and forth between my ankle and Yohwa's ankle, and then, all at once, the three artisans thrust their thumbs up at me and shouted.
"W-we respect you, young hero!"
"Huh?"
They were saying they respected my hobbies, but something told me there was a massive misunderstanding brewing.
'No, it's not like that! She's not my lover, she's my pet!'
***
"Wait, you're really bringing all of them?"
"Can't be helped, can it? Things turned out this way. Besides, they'll be useful."
At the Divine Thief's question, I looked around me.
Snow and Ice perched on either shoulder.
Hyang atop my head.
Yohwa and Cho flanking me on both sides.
And Yeondu coiled around my neck.
Since I had already left them behind once for a long journey, the moment they heard I was going somewhere nearby, they all filed out after me.
My plan to slip away quietly with the Divine Thief had completely fallen apart.
With Hwa-eun, Seol noona, and even the young miss named Yeong-ryeon, the Divine Thief's disciple, joining in, the group could no longer be called small. Since things had turned out this way, I decided we might as well take a leisurely trip.
After all, he said we would only be taking mountain paths, and the destination wasn't far from here.
And above all, I had considered finding some way to leave them behind, but...
My instincts, my Fabre instincts, were telling me that this time, I should bring the whole crew.
"You're saying they'll be useful?"
"Yes. If a dangerous venomous creature shows up, these little ones will protect us."
The two defensive weapons I had discovered in the Heavenly Silkworm: its powerful thread, and the scent-emitting organ, the osmeterium.
Considering those, it was entirely possible that something extremely powerful was preying on the Heavenly Silkworms. And if so, there might come a moment when Cho or Yohwa were absolutely needed.
'Who knows? Maybe we'll discover another one of the Ten Great Venomous Creatures.'
If the opponent was one of the Ten Great Venomous Creatures, the best way to deal with it was with another of the Ten Great.
If the opponent was one of the Ten Great, both Cho and Yohwa would be essential.
I had already learned that lesson the hard way from our encounter with Gweong, that Strange Screaming Tiger.
The Strange Screaming Tiger had been so formidable that Cho and Yohwa, still young, had barely managed to take it on together.
Setting out from the Tang Family estate, we headed for a forest on the border between Sichuan and Qinghai Province.
After pushing through a dense forest where trees soared high into the sky, a rather unusual terrain came into view.
The rim of a vast basin was thick with trees, but inside the basin itself, not a single blade of grass grew. Red earthen boulders jutted up here and there, forming small, sharp peaks.
Even at a glance, the red spires, easily twenty or thirty meters tall, made for a spectacular sight.
It reminded me of the Stone Forest I had briefly visited in Yunnan, Seol noona's homeland.
"Quite a sight, isn't it? Is this the place?"
"That's right. The previous Divine Thief reportedly discovered the cocoons and Heavenly Silkworm eggs right here."
"So this is it.... It's broader than I expected, though."
"I'd have to agree."
Looking down into the basin from above, my impression was that it was enormously wide.
This place, named Red Rock Forest, seemed roughly half the size of Yeouido from my previous life. [TL Note: Yeouido is a large island district in Seoul, often used as a unit of area comparison in Korean media.]
The number of spires was not merely dozens, but easily a hundred or more.
Confirming the sheer scale of the area, I realized that my assumption of a quick visit had been a definite mistake.
What's more, while the Divine Thief knew that a previous generation's Divine Thief had found Heavenly Silkworms somewhere in this area, he did not know the exact location.
Alongside the creed that nothing could be passed on unless it was stolen, apparently keeping written records was also forbidden.
It seemed to be something like a thief's code against leaving ledgers. In any case, for that reason, information about the location had only been passed down orally, making it impossible to pinpoint the exact spot.
In the end, it looked like we would have to comb through this entire place to find what the Heavenly Silkworms fed on.
"This isn't going to be easy to find, is it?"
I had hoped an expert's eye might see things differently, but...
All I could see were red rocky peaks.
To find anything here, it felt like we would need to search through every single one of those hundred-odd spires, one by one.
***
-Tap! Tap!
"What a interesting rock."
The first spire we approached after descending into the basin to begin our search.
Hwa-eun picked up a loose stone from the ground and rapped it against the rock face.
The echo rang out across the basin.
As Hwa-eun said, the red spires were truly peculiar.
Each one was large enough that dozens of people could encircle it, and the surface was perfectly smooth.
It looked as though the surface of the massive boulder had been melted away by something.
Almost like concrete, or perhaps like a red high-rise building standing on Yeouido.
"Did you find anything up top?"
I scaled the spire with Qinggong and called out to the Divine Thief. He was surveying the surroundings from the summit but shook his head.
"Nothing to speak of."
When viewed from above the basin, the floor, devoid of even a single blade of grass like a desert, was covered in nothing but red soil, apparently weathered and fallen from the rocks.
From up here, it looked no different than it had from below.
"Soryong, I may not know as much about insects and venomous creatures as you do, but it doesn't seem like there's much here for a Heavenly Silkworm to feed on."
Even Hwa-eun, who usually deferred to me when it came to venomous creatures, was voicing the opinion that there could hardly be any food source in such a barren place.
No matter how much of a Spiritual Creature the Heavenly Silkworm was, if it laid its eggs here, finding food would naturally be extremely difficult.
"Still, the Divine Thief says this is the right place, so let's search thoroughly for now."
"Understood."
"And you lot, help Mommy and Daddy search carefully too. What we're looking for is... round red eggs, or venomous creatures, anything like that."
-Hiss!
-Chirp!
-Tsurur!
At my words, Cho soared into the air and Yohwa scrambled up the side of a spire.
Yeondu stayed atop my head, while Ice and Snow perched on my shoulders like watchtowers, scanning in every direction.
-Chirr chirr!
Then Hyang, as if to say she would search with her own feet, crawled down from my body and began scouring the area.
"Hyang, be careful, all right? Don't wander too far. Yeondu, follow Hyang around. It might be dangerous."
-Hiss!
I sent Yeondu along as Hyang's chaperone just in case, but Hyang, adorable as ever, carried on her own earnest search, fetching round red pebbles and climbing up pillars in her own little way.
-Tssrit?
"No, that's not it. That's just a pebble."
The little thing had picked up a red pebble from somewhere and was tilting her head at me.
It was already the fifth time. Every time a stone was even slightly different in shape, Hyang would carry it over and show it to me.
-Tssrit?
Not long after, Hyang's questioning call reached me again, asking if this one was the right thing.
Thinking she had fetched yet another pebble, I smiled and crouched down in the direction of the sound.
There, in the shadow I cast, a single bug was thrashing wildly in Hyang's mouth.
I jolted in surprise, plopping down on the ground, and shouted.
"Hyang! Where did you find that!?"
While everyone else had come up empty, Hyang had appeared out of nowhere with a bug roughly the size of an egg clamped in her jaws.
The creature was squirming frantically in Hyang's mouth.
*****
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