Gaia Space, Whiterun Island, in the fields of the castle camp.
Sounds came from the roughly twenty-five-square-meter box rooms made of metal and elastic toughwood within an enormous mechanical framework:
Clack-clack-clack...
The crisp sounds rang out without pause. In Jiang Han's view, Miss Mela and her clanswomen hung elegantly and efficiently from the ceiling, hands and claws gripping tools as they calibrated and installed components according to the blueprints.
Their skirts were fastened to their carapaces with hooks, so even when they were completely upside down, their skirts would not fall.
They also observed Earth's regulations very faithfully. Though suspended from the ceiling, they still wore yellow construction safety helmets with chin straps and bows. Their claws seemed to have replaced a spider's silk-spinning organs, able to spray pale, nearly transparent brown threads.
Those threads had astonishing load-bearing capacity; even with the bodies of these Weaving Maid Clan members hanging from them, they showed no sign of snapping.
One had to know that members of the Weaving Maid Clan weighed between 3.5 and 5 tons on average. Though they looked like girls of thirteen to fifteen, the naturally grown carapaces on their spider bodies were immensely heavy. Thus, despite standing only around two meters tall, they possessed such shocking weight.
"This room... is finished." Having completed the engineering installation with astonishing efficiency, Mela descended from the ceiling and stood before Jiang Han with her clanswomen.
It had to be said that they possessed another endearing trait: their lower halves were not entirely spider-like.
Rather, beautiful carapaces grew from the human portions of their legs, from which arthropod-like spider legs protected by shells extended outward. So once they drew themselves together, they were not even two meters tall, but could shrink down to just over one and a half meters. Jiang