Seven women, cornered by the pilgrim Pa-chieh at the edge of their bathing pool, flee to a pavilion and "spun spiders' threads so thickly that" he is entangled and falls; the thread is theirs to make, the first sign that these are not ordinary women. The confirmation comes later. When the same seven turn up allied with a Taoist abbot who has poisoned the travellers' tea, and Sun goes for them, they drop the human shape entirely: they "transformed themselves into huge" spiders, able "to spin ropes instead of webs with which to" bind their enemies, before Sun "attacked and killed them all." Here the transformation of a person into a spider is not a curse laid from outside but a nature revealed, the woman's true web-spinning body stepping out of the disguise.

The episode is drawn from the Hsi yü chi, the journey of the Monkey and his Master westward, in a compilation of Chinese myth published 1922; the apparatus that gives this address its number cites it as "Werner 364", set beside a Swiss and a Gold Coast authority that wait unread. The narrative frame is a comedy of shape-shifting on every side. Pa-chieh finds the women by turning "into a fish", which they "tried to catch, chasing" and pursue "hither and thither round the pool"; their seven dwarf sons meet the rescuers as "a swarm of dragon-flies, bees, and other insects"; the abbot who shelters them proves "a demon with a thousand eyes". In such a world the spider-women are simply one more thing wearing a borrowed body.

Stith Thompson (1885–1976), the American folklorist whose motif-index numbers this shape, set it under transformations of a human into an insect. What is striking in the served witness is the direction of the change: not a punishment turning a person into a lower thing, but a monster's convenience, the spider-self resumed the moment fighting or fleeing requires it. If the spider was always the truth beneath the woman, which shape was the disguise?