You're Not My Type

As the day of his meeting with Toji Fushiguro drew closer, Shoichi Kano grew increasingly nervous.

To be honest, Kano had initially thought the Heavenly Restriction Tyrant was incredibly cool. In the original story, the man had driven Satoru Gojo into a corner during his Jujutsu High days with nothing but his body and cursed tools. But now that Kano actually lived under the same sky as him, fear welled up in his heart.

He was terrified that a couple of wrong words would get his head twisted off and kicked around like a soccer ball.

So lately, he had spent every school day on pins and needles. Even his homeroom teacher, Mr. Tanaka, noticed something was wrong and suggested he visit the school counseling office in his free time.

The Slit-Mouthed Woman was also afraid Kano might have an emotional breakdown and try bungee jumping off a skyscraper without a cord. She had cut back considerably on teasing him lately and settled firmly into her role as his mother.

After they returned home from school that day, the Slit-Mouthed Woman changed back into her house clothes, picked up a rather thick envelope beside the shoe cabinet, and handed it to Kano. "A package arrived around noon today. I saw your name on it, so I signed for it."

"Huh?" Shoichi Kano asked curiously. "Aren't you a cursed spirit? How did the delivery guy see you?"

The Slit-Mouthed Woman pointed at the floor beneath her feet. "Barrier technique. Pretty amazing, right?"

"All right..." Shoichi Kano accepted that explanation. "But with your personality, you actually didn't open my package behind my back? The sun must have risen in the west."

The Slit-Mouthed Woman clutched her chest and backed away a few steps, her face full of wounded indignation. "Is that really how you see your mother?"

Shoichi Kano rolled his eyes and silently began tearing open the envelope.

Sure enough, it was from Dengeki Bunko...

A rejection letter.

In the letter, Dengeki Bunko's editorial team praised Shoichi Kano's novel premise and reasonably competent prose, but said the emotional writing was too stiff and the characters were painfully shallow. Most importantly, they could not understand why the protagonist Kano had written kept slaughtering people's entire families.

Whenever someone offended him, he not only turned the tables and killed them while showing off and humiliating them, but also tracked down their whole family and slaughtered them.

Shoichi Kano's face darkened. Only then did he realize he had been so focused on plagiarizing that he had overlooked the specific cultural context. Japanese light novels in this era leaned toward intricate worldbuilding or nuanced expressions of personal emotion, not intense conflict and wish-fulfillment thrills! Besides, this was their golden age. The works produced now were leagues beyond the isekai toilet paper of later years!

The work he had copied had both worldbuilding and emotional expression, but neither met the requirements on its own! Without the proper cultural adaptation, it was only natural that the story failed to take root in a foreign country!

He turned to the bottom of the letter and found a thin check stapled to the paper, made out for 1,800 yen.

The reason for the check was simple. To avoid discouraging a newcomer's enthusiasm for creative writing, the editorial team had specifically requested a small consolation payment from their superiors: 300 yen per chapter. Shoichi Kano had submitted six chapters electronically, which naturally came to 1,800 yen.

"What is it?" the Slit-Mouthed Woman asked curiously.

Shoichi Kano pulled the check off the letter and put it away, then shoved the letter into her arms. "Read it if you want. It's no big deal."

She read the letter carefully from beginning to end, and her composure began to crack.

Shoichi Kano was speechless. "Just laugh if you want to."

"Hahahahaha!"

The Slit-Mouthed Woman crumpled the letter into a ball and tossed it into the trash, then reached out to stroke Kano's hair. "That's a whopping 1,800 yen, sweetie. Have you decided how to spend it?"

Shoichi Kano's face darkened further.

Still, to be fair, after all that messing around, the gloom hanging over Kano's heart had lifted somewhat.

A few days later, the time came to meet Toji Fushiguro.

They had agreed to meet at a racetrack. By the time Kano and the Slit-Mouthed Woman finally managed to squeeze their way inside, the race had already begun. Eight fine horses of different colors galloped down their respective lanes, tugging at the spectators' heartstrings.

Every so often, someone cheered as their favored horse gained an advantage, while others sighed when the horse they had picked fell slightly behind at a turn. Unfortunately, people did not share the same joys and sorrows. Kano just found them noisy.

For the Slit-Mouthed Woman, however, this place felt wonderfully refreshing. The negative emotions of the spectators and gamblers turned into cursed energy, which she absorbed into her body one by one, adding to the power surging within her cursed energy core.

Shoichi Kano kept squeezing forward through the crowd until he spotted a burly, rugged man nearby, wearing a black short-sleeved T-shirt, white cuffed pants, and traditional Beijing cloth shoes.

The man had medium-length black hair with naturally drooping ends and slightly narrowed eyes. His most distinctive feature was the vertical scar at the left corner of his mouth. Although it had partially healed, the flesh there was still visibly different in color from the surrounding skin, like a mark unique to him.

He stood among the crowd, holding a horse-racing newspaper and occasionally glancing between its contents and the track. Judging by the slight tremble in his hands, he had probably placed a bet on one of the horses as well.

"Number eight!!!!"

"Number eight!!!!"

Suddenly, deafening cheers erupted around the track. The unexpected wave of sound left Shoichi Kano's head spinning. When he recovered and took a closer look, he realized that horse number eight had crossed the finish line first and won the race.

"Hmph..." The burly man holding the racing newspaper gave a quiet grunt, visibly relaxing.

He casually crumpled the newspaper into a ball and tossed it into a trash can some distance away.

Only after making sure he would not spoil the man's enjoyment did Shoichi Kano slowly approach him. "Mr. Fushiguro?"

Toji Fushiguro sat in the racetrack stands in a thoroughly relaxed posture. At first, he simply gazed straight ahead with an easy expression. Only when he heard someone call his name did he unhurriedly turn his head to the right, lowering his gaze slightly to meet Shoichi Kano's eyes.

His gaze was like a fine blade tucked into its sheath. Though it showed no edge at the moment and could even be called calm, it still exerted a faint pressure.

Kano responded with a sufficiently sincere smile.

Then, apparently finding him rather uninteresting, Toji Fushiguro looked behind Shoichi Kano instead.

Standing there, naturally, was the Slit-Mouthed Woman, dressed in ordinary casual clothes with a mask over her face.

As someone with a fully realized heavenly restriction, Toji Fushiguro had no cursed energy whatsoever, but his physical abilities had been enhanced far beyond human limits. That naturally included his five senses, which allowed him to perceive cursed spirits directly.

"Kid, and that cursed spirit." He withdrew his gaze, a faint, condescending smile on his face, as though he thought little of either Kano or the Slit-Mouthed Woman. "Are you two the helpers the Q Organization found for me?"

Shoichi Kano remained deferential. "Yes, Mr. Fushiguro. My name is Shoichi Kano, and this lady is Miss Cursed Spirit, the special grade imaginary cursed spirit known as the Slit-Mouthed Woman. If needed, we can offer whatever help we're capable of."

Meanwhile, Toji Fushiguro's unusual constitution had already piqued the Slit-Mouthed Woman's curiosity. This was her first time seeing a human with absolutely no cursed energy. When she first heard the rumors about the Heavenly Restriction Tyrant, she had even been skeptical.

Only now, after witnessing it for herself, did she realize those claims were all true.

But when the Slit-Mouthed Woman instinctively reached out to touch him so she could gather firsthand data on heavenly restriction, Toji Fushiguro deftly leaned slightly to his left, making her hand miss.

"Sorry." Toji Fushiguro's expression remained calm, his tone steady and his words clear, as though he were stating an objective fact rather than expressing a personal feeling. "You're not my type."

The Slit-Mouthed Woman froze with her hand still halfway outstretched.

Just then, the phone in his pocket rang. He ignored Kano and his companion outright and reached for it to answer the call.

Kano had sharp eyes and immediately spotted the name "Shiu Kong" on the incoming call display. If he remembered correctly, this Korean man had acted as something like Toji Fushiguro's broker in the original story. Most of Toji's jobs had come through him.

Toji Fushiguro said little after answering the phone. He merely grunted in acknowledgment a few times, nodded, and hung up.