Editing/Standardisation: kubor04
Formatting/Extras: APM
Original Translation: Blastron
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I’ve got some thread wound around my forelegs. It stretches when I pull them apart, and snaps back together when I relax. Awesome. It’s stretchy like rubber, just as I was hoping.
What am I doing? Glad you asked. Ever since I found out that my [Spider Thread] has a skill associated with it, I’ve been trying various experiments to raise my proficiency. Until now, I haven’t really been trying to use my threads for anything but building webs and tying up my prey, so I truly had no idea what these were capable of.
Hm? What happened to going outside and leveling up, you say? Haha, as if. I may have gotten a little bit excited immediately after I leveled up, but after I calmed down I realized how foolish it was. Think about it: I’m a girl who’s only good at video games. Do you seriously think I’d be good in a real fight? As if. I might have a monster’s body, but I still barely know how to move it.
There’s a world of difference between playing a game and actually moving my body. For starters, a game character doesn’t get tired, while a real body runs out of stamina if you move too much. Back on Earth, for instance, I was a very frail girl who got tired just walking to and from school. If I had to fight a monster with real, natural-born monster instincts, I think it would be very difficult for me to win, wouldn’t it?
Therefore, my current plan of letting prey get stuck in my webs has a much higher chance of success. Compared to aimlessly wandering around the dungeon, this is not only safer but far more efficient as well. I’m sure there may come a time where I have to leave my home, but I first want to get my level up a bit until I have a much bigger margin of error. I may have played an absurdly specialized character in that MMO, but in other RPGs, I usually prefer to do a bunch of early grinding to get my levels up. That way, I can just steamroll every boss in my way while I whistle a jaunty tune. Now that it’s my own, precious life, I’d much rather play it safe until I think I’m strong enough to beat everything easily.
So, as part of my plan to safely get my level up, I’m trying to raise the level of my [Spider Thread] skill. My thread is my lifeline, right? If I hadn’t made my home, I’d still be lost wandering around the dungeon. The thought sends shivers down my spine. I wouldn’t have been able to survive like that, would I? I wouldn’t have any safe place to rest, nor would I be able to catch any prey. I owe this pleasant lifestyle entirely to my wonderful silk.
Thus, I think leveling up my thread is my best course of action. I don’t know how it might change as I gain more levels, but I can’t think of any downsides. Just spinning more thread didn’t seem to raise my skill at all, so I’ve been trying various experiments to see what its properties are. I’ve tried to see if I have any control over its various properties, like its thickness, adhesiveness, strength, and elasticity.
Controlling the thickness was extremely simple: if I think about spinning thin thread, thin thread comes out. I can’t make it so fine you can’t see it, but I can make it about the thickness of a human hair. In the dim light of the dungeon, such a thin thread should be almost impossible to see. I did a little test on its strength, and as expected it gets a lot less resilient as it gets thinner. Ah, well, it can’t be helped. It’s only natural that a thin thread would be more fragile than a thick one. Hopefully, when my skill level goes up, the threads will get stronger.
Conversely, making the thread thicker makes it way stronger. The thickest thread I can produce is nearly two centimeters in diameter. It’s almost like a rope, isn’t it? Well, two centimeters is about all I can produce under normal circumstances, but if I braid a bunch of it together I can get a much thicker cord. That takes time, though.
My adhesion experiments went… poorly. It’s true that there are both sticky and non-sticky kinds of spider thread, but the real reason why spiders don’t get stuck in it is because they know what they’re doing. I can move around my webs just fine on instinct, but when I tried to figure things out manually, I somehow managed to tie my entire body up. Ahhhhh, yeah. It’s only natural that things would get tangled up when trying to learn how to use different kinds of thread, but it’s my own stupidity that got me tied up.
Ahh, I was too impatient. I hadn’t yet noticed that I could reduce the stickiness of my threads after I spun them, and I almost died thanks to getting caught in my own trap. That would have been way, way, way too dumb of a way to go out. Thanks to a stroke of divine inspiration, I realized that, as long as the thread’s still attached to my butt, I can change its properties. After I disentangled myself, I tested to see if I could change the properties of a thread after I’d cut it, but it doesn’t look like that’s the case.
After I pulled myself together, I experimented with the thread’s strength. While I did confirm that thin threads are weak and thick threads are strong, I have no idea what the maximum strength of these threads actually are. How could this be, you ask? When I crank the strength up to the max, I’m completely and utterly incapable of breaking it with my own strength. Even scarier, I can’t slice or bite through it. Anything that gets caught up in this thread will probably be stuck there forever. Ah, well, there might be monsters that are strong enough to tear through it, so I shouldn’t be too overconfident.
Last but not least, the results of my elasticity test: this stretchy, bouncy thread that I’ve got wrapped around my forelegs. Yeah. This rubbery thread is going to be super useful. If I could find suitable rocks to attach to it, I could make a simple slingshot, and I’m sure I’ll come up with many other uses for it.
I’m quite satisfied with my experimental results. However, even after all that, my skill level didn’t go up at all. Plus, I found out about a huge issue with my silk-spinning that I can’t ignore: making these threads consumes my energy like mad. As a result, even though it’s been barely any time since I killed that frog, I’m already exceedingly hungry. It’s not like my fuel efficiency is terrible, but if I’m going to be spinning such large quantities of thread in the future, I’m definitely going to need to eat a bigger lunch first.
APM - Translation 