Legends: The Emerald World

As he sat beside the fire, Shin waved a long hemp rope out of the bushes he scavenged from the frozen forest with Char hiding inside his hair to stave off the cold. Ase and Mary worked through the tentacle snake and skinned it, saving as much of the skin as possible to turn into shoes.

Ase's sharp claws came in clutch, they were the only thing they could use to work the tough leathery skin.

Mary came up with the idea of filling the shoes' bottom with sticks or tree bark to give them more surface. That would make walking on the snow far easier, which she's certain they'll be doing a lot of.

Ase looked at the parts of the skin they managed to recover and she wasn't that thrilled with the idea. She relies on her foot claws a lot for traction and climbing, so wearing shoes instead of her usual sandals would hugely reduce her mobility. But she also was feeling the stink of the cold cutting cracks across her bones, her poor ankles wouldn't survive another walk in the snow.

But, that wasn't the only thing on her mind, making the show bottom wider would consume more of their largest pieces of skin, which she was hoping to use to make at least a pair of underwear. It won't help that much with the cold, but at least they'd be wearing something.

"Shin…can't we save some for clothes?" Ase looked at him with a worried face and he stared back at her, showing her his blue toes and bleeding fingers from braiding the rope. "Want kind of answer do you want?"

Ase sighed, "Sorry, I know we don't need them." She looked down at herself, "I'm just not comfortable being naked like this."

"No one is." Shin went back to braiding the hemp rope. "But it's really simple. What do you want, to stay naked for a while or have to sever your feet later since they died from the cold?"

In their current condition, they are most likely to die in the cold instead of an abomination attack. The first thing to die would be the feet that they walk on, the snow will have no mercy on them. To keep warm, they can hide by the fire or stick close to each other, but they certainly won't survive moving outside the tree barefoot.

Mary smiled, "Cheer up a bit. At least it's Shin and not some stranger." She patted her shoulder, "If we happen to hunt another snake will make underwear from its skin."

At that moment, Mary noticed that her worth had suddenly increased. She was at 102541 gold coins, but now her worth had reached 126523 gold coins. She was a wealthy merchant, but she had never seen her worth jump by a quarter like that.

Mary barely managed to contain the grin swelling to her face. At first, she thought this situation was bad, and still thinks they are in a spot that no one would envy them about, pure suffering. But who would've thought, that with misfortune comes fortune? There is no pleasure without pain, and despite her embarrassment about being naked and the painful cold she had managed to get a bit closer to Shin.

She stole a glance at Shin working, trying to figure out what made him see her in a better light. Was it her stunning body? No, he didn't seem to care, in fact, she almost felt offended to see him being indifferent to seeing her naked or being naked in front of them.

Thinking about it for a while, her eyes finally landed on Ase. It was probably talking Ase out of getting underwear and wasting the skin, Shin probably values a comrade who assists him in leadership positions just as those who fight with him. He's a guy so probably can't convince Ase that being naked around him is okay so he needs another woman to convince her.

"Say Shin, do you know what should we do next? How could we find the dead egg we're looking for?" She asked with a worried tone, fearing that his affection toward her might drop.

Surprisingly, it didn't even change as he lifted his head. "The world spider looked like a massive black widow spider but had a personality akin to a human psychopath, enjoying the suffering and agony of her prey."

Shin knew her personally, she was originally a demon spider that he tamed and evolved into a devil-eating spider of divine power. But him saying that she was a psychopath was somewhat of a lie, she wasn't really fond of killing people, she only enjoyed torturing them, especially devils. On top of that, she had one trait that made him avoid her as the plague, only meeting her with the dragon overlord present.

She was mad, in a twisted way. Her ultimate dream concerned Shin personally as her tamer. From the day she got a humanoid form she wanted to fulfil her lore as a black widow with him. In short, she wanted to be his mate and eat him right after mating so he'll be hers forever.

Once a year the world spider would pop out several unfertilized eggs which she'll bury beneath the ground. They'll never hatch and she wasn't open to the idea of selling them for money, which makes Shin convinced that they are now looking for such an egg.

"Buried deep beneath the ground." Shin looked at Mary, "I don't know how we'll get to it, but I'm sure we can find where the egg is buried by looking for some special marks on the ground." He looked confident.

"Those marks, what are they?" Mary didn't know where he was getting all that information, but she couldn't care less. Saying yes and blindly following his lead seems to be getting her the most affection from him so she'll just nod and say yes.

"Sticky ground, demonic aura, black head mushrooms, the smell of acid and coffee, and I guess some magical marks if any of that was left." He looked outside, "Her silk threads are probably one of the most powerful in the world, I doubt they would decompose even after a thousand years."

"Is this world spider some kind of a unique monster? Never heard of anything like her before." Mary looked at Shin with a smile.

"She wasn't just any unique monster. The massive world tree spanned through the whole world, her branches danced with the sun beside the heavens, and its roots spanned deep into the fiery rotten hellscape of the underworld. The world spider built her nest around the world tree's roots and ate the demons and devils trying to consume the world tree's power." Shin leaned back on the war tree trunk, "Pest control, but the pests she dealt with were demons that only one of them could ruin a whole kingdom."

"So she was a good monster?"

"No, she enjoyed eating humans the same way she enjoyed eating demons and devils. Humans were lucky she lived in the underworld." Shin cracked into a smile, "But she wasn't mindless and could be reasoned with. So I'll at least give her that, she was far better than the demons or devils."

"Did she have a name beside the world spider? I'd expect a monster like her would be named."

"Arachnophobia, the fear of spiders. The only thing both humans and demons agreed upon was her name, they both feared her. But I called her Arachne."