Chapter 557

Ludger stared at the fibers, searching for some clue in the weave.

Had the “sticky” property been a fresh secretion? A coating? Something the spiders added right before firing a line? Or was it a mana effect, temporary adhesion maintained by the spider’s own will?

Or… is it because it’s no longer in contact with the spiders?

he wondered.

If the silk’s special behavior required a constant link, something like a living tether to the queen’s network, then harvested silk would naturally lose it. Dry out. Go inert. Become just material again.

Which would be convenient. And suspicious. Ludger didn’t like mysteries he couldn’t test. He looked at Julia.

“May I?”

Julia blinked. “It’s yours. It’s a prototype.”

Ludger nodded once. He slid the glove onto his hand. It fit better than it had any right to. Snug at the palm, flexible at the knuckles. He flexed his fingers, feeling the fabric stretch and return without resistance. Then he did something Julia clearly wasn’t expecting. He pushed mana into it.

Not a spell. Not a rune. Just raw flow, controlled, steady, the way you fed mana into a tool to see how it behaved.

For a heartbeat, nothing happened. Then the glove began to glow.

A clean, faint light that spread through the fibers like the cloth was drinking it.

Julia’s eyes widened. “What—”

“It takes mana,” Ludger said quietly, more observation than explanation.

The glow intensified, the fabric shimmering as if the threads were waking up. Not sticky. Not grabbing. Just… receptive.

Ludger narrowed his eyes. Then he shifted the mana aspect.

Earth Overdrive.

The change was immediate.

The glow turned from pale to a muted light brown, like sunlit stone. The fibers tightened. The glove stiffened in his hand, not rigid like metal, but hardened like cured leather reinforced with something denser.

He flexed his fingers again. The glove resisted slightly, then moved with him, holding shape as if it now had a spine. Julia stared like she’d just watched cloth become armor.

“That’s…” she started, then stopped, because there wasn’t an obvious word for it.

“Interesting,” Ludger finished for her.

He tapped the hardened knuckles against the edge of the desk.

Thunk.

Not soft cloth. Not quite plate. Somewhere in between.

The hardness faded a fraction as the Overdrive eased, but the fibers remained more structured than before, like they’d remembered the instruction.

Ludger’s eyes sharpened with a different kind of focus.

If the silk could accept mana directly, if it could be

charged

without runes, then maybe the answer wasn’t a traditional enchanter at all.

Maybe the silk itself was the medium. And if the sticky property vanished when the spider’s influence was gone…

Then perhaps it wasn’t a chemical glue.

Perhaps it was a mana behavior the spiders imposed, an active effect, not a passive trait.

Ludger slowly pulled the glove off, watching the glow fade back to normal as the mana bled out of the fibers. Julia was still staring.

“You can do that to cloth?” she asked, half awed, half worried, like she’d just realized she’d walked into a town where the buildings and the textiles both listened to one boy.

“I can do a lot that takes mana,” Ludger replied.

He looked at the glove again, thoughtful.

“And now I know this silk does.”

He turned it over in his hands, mind already racing. Hardening layers. Mana-fed resistance. Temporary reinforcement before a fight. Underwater grip. Shock absorption. Anti-pierce behavior that could be

enhanced

on demand. The kind of edge that didn’t need permanent runes. Just a user who could feed it the right mana at the right moment.

Ludger glanced up at Julia.

“Make more gloves,” he said.

Julia blinked. “How many?”

Ludger’s expression stayed calm, but his eyes had that dangerous, planning look again.

“Enough,” he said, “that I can start testing what this material really is.”

Ludger held the glove up to the light, turning it slowly.

The hardened fibers caught the sunset glow and answered with that muted, earthy sheen, light brown, like packed clay after rain. It didn’t look like cloth anymore. It looked like something that had been

taught

to be stronger.

His mind drifted into the mechanics.

What are you?

Was the thread created by mana?

His Geomancer class could do it, create earth from mana, shape it, harden it, reinforce it. Not perfectly out of nothing; there were rules and costs, but the principle held. Mana could become matter if you had the right pathway.

If spider silk worked the same way, then the spiders weren’t just animals. They were mana printers.

On the other hand… ordinary spiders made silk from their bodies. Protein. Fluid. A physical substance produced the ugly, biological way. Spiders here might do the same.

It could even be a mix. A base physical fiber, spun from bodily fluids, then

reinforced

, woven with mana in the moment, coated with intent, turned sticky or elastic or hard depending on need. That would explain the fights.

It would explain why the “sticky” property seemed to vanish once the silk was harvested, cut away from the spider’s control and the dungeon’s ambient influence.

It would also explain why it reacted to mana so cleanly. Ludger’s eyes narrowed. If it responded to mana, then it wasn’t just cloth. It was a medium. A tool. And tools had uses far beyond what he had imagined. He let the mana flow stop.

The glow faded immediately, the light brown color dimming as if someone had turned down a lantern. But the glove didn’t soften right away. It stayed hard. For a while.

Ludger flexed it in his hand and felt the resistance remain, like the fibers were holding the structure out of habit. Then, slowly, the rigidity began to bleed away. The brown tint thinned, retreating from the seams and knuckles first, until it became normal fabric again.

Soft. Elastic.

Like it hadn’t just pretended to be armor. Ludger watched the last trace of color vanish and filed the result away with cold satisfaction.

Residual charge,

he thought.

Holds shape, then decays.

That meant timing mattered. That meant duration could be measured. That meant training could turn “interesting” into “reliable.” And if the silk was partially mana-made… Or if it was physical silk that

accepted

mana like a sponge… Either way, the conclusion was the same.

This material had more uses than clothing.

Ludger looked down at the glove in his hand, then up at Julia, who was still staring like she’d accidentally walked into a research lab instead of a frontier town.

“We’ll test it properly,” Ludger said, voice calm.

Inside his head, the next steps were already taking shape.

Ludger set the glove down carefully.

Not because it was fragile, it clearly wasn’t, but because rushing was how you broke valuable things in the long run.

There was no need to sprint toward every possible use of spider silk and pretend he could solve it in one week. That was how you ended up with a dozen half-baked products and a reputation for gimmicks.

Better to learn it slowly.

Standardize processing. Measure how it held mana. Track decay time. Build a reliable product line, gloves, scarves, liners, then expand, piece by piece, as they understood the material more.

A controlled climb. Besides, he had other things to do anyway. And one of them was finally arriving.

The guild yard outside had that specific sound of a convoy returning, wagon wheels, raised voices, the clink of gear being set down, the relieved laughter of people who’d spent too long pretending the road wasn’t trying to slow them.

Ludger stepped out of the office and saw them.

Derrin. Mira. Taron. Rhea. Callen.

Dusty, sun-tired, and carrying themselves with that loose satisfaction of a job done clean. They were fresh back from another delivery mission to the Velis League.

They didn’t look lost. They looked like they’d won.

Derrin rolled his shoulders until something popped. “Gods, I missed solid ground that isn’t trying to slide out from under me.”

Rhea stretched her arms overhead, grinning. “You say that like the road wasn’t trying to kill us twice.”

Mira gave Ludger a quick wave, the team’s glue even on empty legs. “Hi, Vice Guildmaster.”

Taron nodded too, quieter but steady. “Vice Guildmaster.”

Ludger returned the nod to each of them. No praise. No fuss. Just acknowledgement.

Then he said, “I want to talk with Taron.”

The reaction was immediate. Derrin’s eyebrows shot up. Mira’s mouth twitched. Rhea’s grin turned predatory.

Callen leaned closer to Taron as if inspecting him for hidden crimes. “Oh no.”

Taron’s shoulders tensed slightly. “What did I do?”

“You know what you did,” Rhea said solemnly, as if she was delivering a funeral speech.

Derrin clapped Taron on the back hard enough to make him stumble. “He’s finally taking you behind the shed.”

Mira added sweetly, “Try to survive. We’ll write something nice on your grave.”

Callen nodded like it was a serious duty. “I’ll water the flowers.”

Taron shot them a look that could’ve curdled milk. “You’re all useless.”

“Correct,” Derrin said cheerfully. “But at least we’re free.”

Ludger didn’t react. He’d already turned, walking toward the side hall.

“Taron,” he said, tone flat. “Now.”

Taron sighed like a man marching to his execution, then followed. Behind them, the others started laughing again, too relieved, too tired, too happy to miss a chance to bully a friend for sport.

Ludger listened to it for half a second. Then his mind shifted back to the real reason he’d called Taron over.

Taron followed Ludger into the side hall, away from the yard noise and the “funeral jokes” that had already started spreading like a disease.

The moment the door shut, the sound dropped to a dull murmur. Taron’s shoulders were still tight, like he expected a reprimand.

He glanced up at Ludger. “So… what is it?”

Ludger didn’t sit. He leaned against the wall, arms folded, and got straight to it.

“I’m planning to start a business repairing runes,” he said.

Taron blinked. “Repairing… runes?”

“Runic gear,” Ludger clarified. “Bracers. Plates. Lamps. Ward disks. Anything with channels that degrade.”

Taron frowned, genuinely surprised now. That wasn’t fear, that was someone being handed a task that didn’t fit the shape of the work they thought they were doing.

Ludger continued, voice calm, practical.

“I won’t be able to focus only on that,” he said. “And I don’t want the repair shop to depend on me being available every time someone’s ward starts cracking. So I need someone else who can do the work.”

Taron’s eyes narrowed slightly. “You want me to engrave runes?”

“No,” Ludger said immediately. “Not engrave. Repair.”

He raised a hand, tapping two fingers against the stone as if he were drawing an invisible line.

“You’re one of the few in the guild who can use runes at all,” Ludger said. “Engraving is harder. Repair is simpler. It’s mostly cleaning channels, re-aligning flow, patching fractures, replacing damaged inlay, slowing degradation before it becomes a failure.”

Taron’s frown deepened. “That sounds like… maintenance.”

“It is,” Ludger replied. “And it pays well.”

He watched Taron’s expression shift as the idea landed.

Taron had trained for delves and fights and practical field runes. Not sitting in a workshop with tools and angry customers asking why their expensive gear was acting like cheap trash.

“That’s not really…” Taron started, then stopped, searching for the right words. “It’s not the kind of work I’m used to.”

“I know,” Ludger said, flatly.

He pushed off the wall and met Taron’s eyes directly.

“I’m not planning to pull you away from your friends,” Ludger said. “You’ll still run missions. You’ll still train. This would be an additional skill. A role. Something that makes you valuable even when you’re not holding a weapon.”

Taron’s gaze flicked away, thinking. “And if I don’t want it?”

“Then you don’t,” Ludger said, simple. No pressure. No threat.

He shrugged slightly. “If you’re not up for it, that’s fine. I’ll make do.”

Taron looked back. “You’ll do it yourself?”

“If I have to,” Ludger said.

Then he added, because this was the real point.

“But if you don’t want it, I want you to recommend someone else—someone who can learn fast and won’t get bored halfway through.” Ludger’s eyes narrowed. “Someone who won’t sell the skill to the first merchant who offers a bag of coins.”

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