Chapter 302: The Gray Spider (1)
The Gray Spider didn’t feel like she had ever felt a cool breeze in her life. In the fall, she was fine with the scent of maple leaves because they barely had any scent. Spring was refreshing, but the water smelled fishy in summer. Because she was alive, she found everything to be disgusting. The Gray Spider wanted to die whenever fall arrived.
Witch. Who even came up with the name? In the language of this world, the word “witch” didn’t simply refer to a mage who could use magic. Niglus—Kukulu, the magic.[1] The word had all sorts of connotations of disgust and contempt, like forsaken, blasphemous, the twenty-third, and cursed.
The word “woman” didn’t also just refer to sex in this world. Firstly, there were more than four sexes in this world. The usual distinction of man and woman didn’t apply here. She was Mirgal. A somewhat appropriate translation would be gray.
In this world, where the three primary colors[2] dominated, Mirgals could only produce offspring by receiving seeds from other sexes. The cursed species of gray was the witches. The season in which the Gray Spider was born was fall.
“You poor thing. Why did you choose to be born in this world?”
Her mother probably didn’t know what she was saying. She had failed to recognize the true value of her newborn child. The child understood everything the mother had said because she was born with the blessing that allowed her to remember everything she ever saw and heard. As a matter of fact, the child had already heard and felt many things while in the womb. The mother had given birth to a genius but didn’t know it.
“You poor thing...”
A handful of water, a little bit of blood, the gaze that looked down on her, and the hand that touched her forehead were sympathies disguised as love, resignation pretending to be comfort, death masquerading as life. And then, there was the smell. The child picked up on the smell of her mother and the scent of autumn.
“Why did you come here?”
The Gray Spider hated the world.
***
—I have nothing against the Magic Tower elder. To me, emotions are actions, Zombie. It’s just that they’re often unnoticeable from the outside, but that’s also an act in a way. Do you think I’m just living the way I feel? Well, that may be the case for people who live just because their life hasn’t ended yet, but not me.