Master, Your Wife Has Become a Super Star Through Fortune-Telling-Chapter 58: Rubber Ghost (Extra)

A long, long time ago, I had a father and a mother, too.

Although... I didn’t have a home...

...

It was a lonely night. The man clutched his unusually long legs, shivering from the cold, yet he remained squatting obediently in the small room.

He had a photograph in his pocket. In it, his father and mother were pressed close together with him in the middle. The three of them were smiling happily, looking impossibly close.

It was a past he missed so deeply that he wondered if a hundred years had already gone by.

He was already twenty-four years old, but he still couldn’t speak a single complete sentence.

The one thing he was best at was propping himself up at the window, waiting for his mother to feed him.

But Mom hadn’t come for several days...

He watched and waited, peering through the small, high window. He knew his mom wouldn’t be coming today, either.

He felt a little disappointed.

Since he was a child, his limbs had been unusually long—so long they didn’t seem human. And he couldn’t speak.

In this ignorant village, he was a monster, scorned by everyone.

His mother locked him in this small room when he was seven, and he remained there until he was twenty-four. Something seemed to be wrong with his mind, too; his intelligence was stuck at the level of a seven-year-old.

That is, until the day he was caught in a great fire, a fire that had been set just for him.

He heard a strangely dressed person dragging his corpse, muttering over and over, "First burn, then drown..."

He also saw his mother, wailing and crying as she searched for her wallet, completely oblivious to the strange person dragging away her dead son.

He was thrown into the water, then put through a series of bizarre procedures.

On his first day at this strange inn, he couldn’t help but cry.

It was the Red-clothed Sister—the one with the long tongue and long, black hair—who spoke the first words to him.

"You’re a ghost now, so why are you still afraid of ghosts?"

It was only then that he dazedly realized he’d gone from being the "beast" his mother called him to the "ghost" the Red-clothed Sister called him.

He spent more and more time in this place.

Eventually, he was given the chance to work as an intern.

He tried his best to stretch his mouth into a grin, trying to make it cover his entire face.

This was a technique the long-tongued Red-clothed Sister had taught him.

When she taught him, she sighed several times, murmuring about how tragic and pitiful it all was. But there was nothing she could do; she could only go along with it.

She had tried to resist once, but the strange boss would whip her with a very painful lash. She resisted again later, and then... she disappeared.

He heard the boss say, "Disobedient things like that should be made to disappear completely!"

’Disobedient things?’

’But the Red-clothed Sister wasn’t a thing. She was a ghost...’

His job was simple: hide in a room, scare people, and then use a long hook to pull out their souls. That way, he would get a new companion.

But he wasn’t always successful. Sometimes he only managed to hook half a soul, and other times just a tiny piece.

Because his failure rate was so high, he was often punished by the boss.

The boss would cover his entire body with strange, yellow papers. Soon after, he would feel an agonizing, burning pain all over.

At times like that, the one he missed the most was his Red-clothed Sister.

She used to get angry all the time, saying she was only eighteen and he wasn’t allowed to call her "Sister."

But even when she was angry, she would still take his strange, misshapen hand and ask if he’d learned how to scare people yet, or if he was still afraid of ghosts.

But she was gone now. He would never hear her ask those things again.

Then he met an even stranger person. She was incredibly agile and strong—strong enough to tie his arms and legs into a bow.

’I’m so mad!’

’But I can’t beat her!’

But on that very night, this strange person confronted his boss.

The strange person was powerful. She defeated the boss with ease and then smoothly sent him on his way.

It seemed like everything had gone off without a hitch. Everything was finally over.

’But... I really want to see the Red-clothed Sister again. I want to tell her that I’ve finally learned how to scare people, that I’m not afraid of ghosts anymore, and that I can even stretch my grin halfway across my face...’