Carrying the corpse of my sibling on my back, I seek out a good spot where people are unlikely to bother me.

What? Why would I take it with me, you ask?

Insurance. Hopefully it won’t come to that, but beggars can’t be choosers.

Eventually, I come to a T-junction with no human footprints in sight, so I decide to set up there.

First, I’ll have to produce the thread. From my butt, I guess? I’m pretty sure that’s the general area the thread should come out of, so let’s give it a shot.

But by the time I finish the thought, I realize I’ve already produced a thread somehow. Huh? I don’t remember this stuff coming out of me…

On top of that, it’s a really long one. Oh man, does this mean I’ve been walking around with a string sticking out of my butt this whole time?

Wow, that’s so embarrassing!

Maybe it’s like when you (redacted), so you (redacted)?

Okay, forget about the fact that I made thread unconsciously for now.

Now to make a home, for real this time!

Finished! I look over my work with satisfaction. A magnificent spiderweb is strung up across the cave passage, blocking the area off.

Man, did my natural instincts kick in or something? As soon as I started working, my body just moved on its own and constructed the web in the blink of an eye.

However, instead of totally completing the net, I left a little hole just big enough for me to squeeze through.

Why? For an escape route, obviously.

I’m settling in at a three-way intersection, which is now hemmed in by my webs over each passage.

But if I blocked it up completely, I wouldn’t be able to get out.

It’s possible, although I doubt it’ll happen, that some fierce opponent might slash through my net.

So I left a hole on purpose, so I can get away in case of an emergency.

Now I’m protected by webs in all three directions, plus, an emergency exit is in place.

The ideal den for a shut-in is complete! Ahhh, there’s no place like home.

All I need now is for prey to get caught in my net on a regular basis.

If I can pull that off, there’s no reason I won’t be able to hide out in this place for the rest of my life.

Awesome!

I did go to school, but other than that, I mostly lived my life on Earth as a recluse. I never talked to anyone at school, and once I got home, I always just played games or surfed the net. Most of my dinners involved adding hot water and waiting three minutes or heating something up on the stove. Occasionally I’d mix things up with a box lunch from the convenience store.

My parents both worked all day and usually got home late. And even when they came home, we never saw each other face-to-face. We only did the bare minimum of chores. To be perfectly honest, it was like living with two total strangers. It’s kind of impressive in a way, that I can’t even remember what my real parents looked like.

Still, I wonder if they were a little bit sad about my death, at least?

Nah, probably not. Although they might be sad about losing what little income I contributed to the household.

I used to earn a small amount of rent money through stocks. If there’s anything they’d miss, it’s probably that.

That was how cold our family relationship was.

My lifestyle probably contributed to my extreme awkwardness when it came to communicating with others.

Or it might’ve just been the personality I was born with, not how I was raised.

As a result, I didn’t have anyone I could call a friend, and even in game chats I usually didn’t say much.

Likewise, my character in my favorite MMO had a reputation for being silent.

My avatar was a somber old bald dude, too. He was a real strong-and-silent type, the kind of good guy who let his actions do all the talking.

And his stats were pretty out there—I maxed out my attack power and speed and left everything else untouched.

But that didn’t matter as long as I didn’t get hit! I just avoided enemy attacks and plowed through everything with a hit-and-run strategy. The perfect plan, aside from the part that a single hit would probably kill me!

Hmm.

I don’t really care about not being able to see my parents or classmates anymore, but it makes me a little sad to think that I’ll never see that old bald guy again. I made him a legend for being one of the few free-to-players who could stand up against the pay-to-players, so it’s a shame to have abandoned his file like that.

…In short, I’m more attached to a game character than I am to my parents. I’ve got a knack for this being-inhuman thing, if I do say so myself.

Besides, it’s true—I’ve never been that good at being a person.

Although, I suppose believing it’s okay to be a bad person is the first step toward becoming one…

Well, since I’m already a bad person, I might as well say it.

Being a recluse is the best! Whoo-hoo!

A white thread is drawn between my two forelegs.

When I pull on it, it goops and stretches.

Then when I stop pulling, it gradually returns to its original length.

Okay. Nice and rubbery, just like I hoped.

What am I doing, you ask?

Experimenting with my spider thread, of course.

From now on, this stuff is going to be my lifeline, so I figured testing out what it can do should be my first priority.

I started by producing a whole bunch of it, experimenting with whether I could control the thickness, stickiness, strength, and elasticity.

Adjusting the thickness was easy enough.

I couldn’t quite make it invisibly thin, of course, but I could get it about as fine as a strand of hair.

In the darkness of this dungeon, that should be really hard to spot.

But when I followed up with a strength test, I discovered that the thinner I made the thread, the more easily it broke.

Well, nothing I can do about that. If you think about it, skinnier would obviously mean more fragile.

Conversely, thickening the thread increases its durability.

The fattest strand I can currently create is a little less than an inch around. Not that different from your average rope, I guess.

Of course, that’s only the maximum for a single raw string. If I really want to make a thicker one, I can just bundle together a bunch of them. Sounds like a lot of work, though.

To be honest, I wish I hadn’t experimented with the stickiness.

It’s easy to assume that all spider threads adhere to everything, but in fact, some aren’t sticky at all.

And apparently, the reason spiders don’t get caught on their own webs is due to their skillful use of these nonstick threads. I realized this when my instincts kicked in as I built my home.

So I decided to experiment to gain a deeper understanding of it, but instead I just tangled up my whole body.

Well…yeah.

Since you have to make proper use of the sticky and nonsticky fibers, it stands to reason that if you don’t, you’ll just get caught in your own threads.

And that’s how I ended up stuck in my own damn spiderweb like an idiot.

That freaked me out. But seriously, one more wrong move and I might’ve been permanently caught in my own trap and died the stupidest death possible.

Luckily, by some miracle, I discovered I could still alter the properties of a thread to a certain extent as long as it was still connected to my butt. After that, I tested whether this could also apply to detached threads and found it could, if only a little bit. I guess that’s a fantasy world for you.

I took a moment to regroup, then started testing the strength.

I already knew that thinner thread was weaker and thicker was stronger, but I wasn’t able to figure out the greatest force it could withstand.

Why, you ask? Because when I produced a maximum-strength thread, I failed to cut through it no matter how hard I tried. Alarmingly enough, I couldn’t even chew through it with my fangs.

If I got caught in a web like this, no way could I just slip out.

Even so, I’m sure there could be other, more powerful monsters able to slice right through it, so I have to be careful not to overestimate its strength.

And so, the final experiment, elasticity, has produced the thread that I’m currently manipulating with my clawed legs.

Okay.

This rubbery thread could certainly come in handy. If I fasten a stone or something to it, I could probably use it as a simple sling.

There’ll definitely be other practical uses for it, too.

Guess my experiment yielded some satisfactory results after all.

However, there is one problem that I can’t ignore much longer—spinning all that thread seems to have drained my energy.

In other words, I’m extremely hungry.

I’ve been wanting food for a long time, but now it feels like my life might be in danger.

Strangely, I’m not particularly thirsty, but the degree of hunger I’m experiencing is undeniably way worse than usual.

At this rate, I’ll starve to death.

I won’t even live to see the sunrise tomorrow. Although, I guess I wouldn’t see that anyway, since I’m in a cave.

If I want to avoid that fate, I have to eat something… And all I have on hand is the thing I brought along as backup…

Should I eat that?

Well, my only other option at the moment is dying, so…

If I’m going to live in a dungeon, I have to get used to eating monsters raw, anyway.

All right. Time to suck it up.

Eating my sibling’s corpse as my first meal after being born seems kinda irredeemably immoral, but I don’t have much of a choice.

Okay, here goes.

Whoa, this is totally gross. So bitter. But I force it down anyway.

I can’t exactly afford to turn up my nose at it just because I don’t like the taste.

So I press on and finish eating my sibling’s carcass.