The spider resting above the heater, pretending to sleep, heard the woman from earlier wailing in the other room.
It lifted its eyelids and looked toward the light spilling through the doorway. Crawling along the wall toward it, it entered another world.
It climbed toward the ceiling and saw the human lying below. She wore a pale blue dress that left her shoulders bare, unlike the clothes it had seen other human women wear.
The woman rolled over. It shifted its legs, remembered its ruined web nest, and decided to find a secluded corner in this room to recover from its injuries.
After moaning over nothing for a while, Xu Zhiqiu got out of bed, turned off the light, and went to sleep.
The Spider Demon had been spinning its web when everything suddenly went black. It looked up toward the spot of light, which had now gone dark, though that did not affect its vision.
Without Xu Zhiqiu knowing, the spider settled into its web in a corner beneath her bed.
It was in the dead of winter that Xu Zhiqiu discovered the Spider Demon in the corner by her bed.
Winter arrived, the temperature plummeted, and snow began falling outside-a rare sight in the southern city where she lived. The mosquitoes and other insects vanished all at once. She no longer needed her mosquito net, so she took it down to wash and put away for summer.
Then she spotted a red spider in the corner where the foot of her bed met the wall!
Xu Zhiqiu clutched her mosquito net, trembling. She quickly dropped it, scrambled off the bed, picked up a broom, and climbed back onto the bed. Staring at the spider, she jabbed at it without hesitation, her hands shaking.
The hibernating Spider Demon was