Kays Translations

Chapter 38: The Completion of the Spider Thread

A few days after I first played with Rodibel, I’d played with the other kids too, but the craze in the village had settled firmly on playing Shundou Muken — the “instant-move no-sword” pretend fights.

It’s fine for them to idolize heroes, really, but doing the exact same thing over and over was already starting to bore me.

So I decided to introduce a different game.

The usual choice would have been something like Reversi, I suppose, but kids in this village liked being active, so I made something else.

“Hey, Al… what is this?” Rodibel asked, squinting at what I’d dragged out.

“Heh heh heh. This is called Daruma Otoshi,” I said.

I showed Rodibel a huge Daruma Otoshi I’d put together — nearly a meter tall when stacked. It was a single log sliced into five thick rounds. Each block weighed ten kilograms. Completely ridiculous, but that was the point.

“You just hit from the side with this mallet, right?” he asked, picking up the handle.

“Right. If it won’t come out, or if the stack topples when you pull a piece, that’s a failure.”

To be blunt: this thing was impossible for children to beat. Each block weighed ten kilos and the mallet was only two — there was no way to brute-force it without collapsing the stack. The whole thing was designed to be cruel like that: you couldn’t simply smash the pieces out, because a heavy-handed approach made the daruma fall apart.

Rodibel swung the mallet eagerly, but even a slightly off-center strike produced no sign of movement.

“…It won’t budge,” he muttered.

“You’ve got to hit harder,” I told him.

A few other kids tried after him, but most only shifted a millimeter or two; nothing toppled. Just as the kids were about to give up, I decided to prod them a little.

“Maybe you can only pull it off if you’re good at Shundou Muken,” I said, with a teasing lilt.

Every child turned to look at me at once.

“You said it was that hard, didn’t you?” someone repeated, sealing the deal with one last, irresistible jibe.

Exactly as I’d hoped, the taunt set them off. They became determined — suddenly desperate to beat the daruma. Of course, there was no chance of any of them doing it easily, but a little mischief was fun. It wasn’t like I was taking revenge because I couldn’t use the mallet as a weapon or anything… honest.

For the record, games like Daruma Otoshi and Reversi spread too quickly to sell as products. Once somebody shows others how to make them, every household has one the next day — they don’t make good merchandise.

“Ah! I almost forgot!” Rodibel suddenly cried, and ran back toward his house. A little while later he returned carrying a round wooden board.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Oh — I forgot I was supposed to fix this,” he said, embarrassed.

He showed me a grain-threshing wooden mortar — a circular board with distinctive grooves carved into it. He’d been supposed to re-cut the grooves and had somehow remembered only now.

“Can you help me with this?” he asked, handing me a second board. He’d brought them here just to make me help him; shrewd, for a kid.

I couldn’t claim any obligation to assist, but since I’d brought the Daruma Otoshi and teased them into trying, I felt obligated. So I agreed to help.

Using a small knife Rodibel lent me, I traced the grooves and deepened them. I could have finished it in moments with alchemy, but I couldn’t show that to the others, so I did it the old-fashioned way.

There were many kinds of threshers. Some were hand-operated like this, others depended on magic or were made into magical tools. At my house we used a magic-based thresher: the inner wall of the vessel had vertical grooves carved into it, and you put the grain in a jar and spun it with wind magic so the kernels rubbed against the grooves and the husks separated.

“—Ah! Right,” I said, pausing.

“What is it? You okay?” Rodibel asked.

“Nah, it’s nothing,” I lied.

I’d almost forgotten how things had been before alchemy made everything convenient. Real craftsmanship had always been about effort: taking time, failing, and trying again.

After helping Rodibel finish the boards, I went straight home and shut myself in my room to write up the specifications for a machine idea that had been brewing while we worked.

The basic structure would be similar to a cotton-candy maker — but because there was no melting involved, all we needed was a way to spin the center. Ideally it would be a magical device that spun itself, but I didn’t know how to make magic tools yet, so this first prototype would be manually operated. I sketched out a mechanism to be moved by hand.

“What an ugly monstrosity,” I muttered to myself.

The next day I enlisted Rugena’s help and we started working in the smithy.

The base would be a large plank with two gears fitted to it: one big, one small. The larger gear would have a handle to crank it; the smaller gear’s axle would be set slightly higher, and atop that axle we’d attach a small case to hold the thread-fluid. Finally, we’d build a little enclosure around the center axle to catch any strands that flew out.

Simple on paper; not simple in practice. Using wooden gears meant teeth chipped off. When we increased the rotation speed the central axle couldn’t withstand the centrifugal forces and snapped. Holes were too large and the thread-fluid would gush out at once. We failed, adjusted, and failed again — over and over.

After five days of grinding, we finally finished the thing.

What to call it? It wasn’t exactly a machine in the industrial sense since it was hand-powered, but its job was to make the fluffy, pre-thread cotton-like material — so I named it the Mawata-ki: the “Raw Cotton Maker.”

“Is it finished?” Rugena asked when I showed her the last fitting.

“Up to this point, yes,” I said.

“Is something wrong?”

“No — it just makes raw wool, not thread. We still need to spin that raw material into real thread to get usable results.”

At the moment the device produced material in a raw, cotton-like state. That had to be spun into thread.

“But why did it make decent raw cotton this time?” Rugena asked, genuinely curious.

“My guess is pressure,” I said. “When I made thread with alchemy before, I only shaped it; it broke if you touched it. This time, by using centrifugal force to squeeze the fluid through extremely tiny holes little by little, the outlet pressure probably helped give it strength.”

“Pressure, huh,” she repeated. “Maybe.”

“If the exit holes are smaller, the fluid experiences more pressure at the outlet. So to make thread from the liquid, you need fineness and pressure.”

“All that’s left is the spinning. Can I ask you to do that?”

“Okay. But the tools are at my place, so we’ll have to go home first.”

“Right. Let’s take the raw cotton home, then.”

Rugena showed me the spinner she used back at home. It was shaped like a spinning top with a long shaft — essentially a drop spindle. She told me, modestly, she wasn’t a craftsperson, so she couldn’t make perfect thread, but it would do the job.

She deftly spun the top and drew the raw fiber into a continuous strand.

“It’s done,” she said, handing me the spun thread.

The thread made from the A solution wasn’t as smooth as silk, but it had a sheen and looked respectable. It was surprisingly strong when pulled — not easy to snap. The thread from the B solution wasn’t as stretchy as rubber, but spun into cloth it would make fabrics with some give; clothes that could flex and recover.

“One last problem can wait,” I said. “For now, make as much thread as you can.”

“…Eh? That is—”

“Please,” I asked, trying to sound as childlike and pleading as possible.

“—N-nooooo!” Rugena shouted, collapsing into a theatrical meltdown.

Well, I’d asked her to make a lot of thread because we were going to be killing a lot of spiders from now on. There was no avoiding it.

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