My Avatar Is Becoming the Final Boss-Chapter 16: Attic

Ji Minghuan sat quietly in his chair, staring motionlessly at the isolation door shrouded in darkness. After a while, he closed his eyes, slumped his shoulders, and looked like he had dozed off in the chair.
“Haven’t seen her in so long...” he thought.
This was perhaps the longest five minutes of Ji Minghuan’s life.
It felt as if a clock inside his mind was ticking, “click-clack, click-clack,” the second hand circling slowly clockwise. He couldn’t wait for these pointless five minutes to end;
but the hour hand was moving rapidly in reverse, dragging him back to memories of his time in the Orphanage.
When Ji Minghuan first met Kong Youling, he was only nine years old.
It was one morning three years ago.
He’d heard from the nurses that a new child had arrived at the Orphanage—a pale, almost frighteningly white mixed-blood girl who was deaf and mute. Because of her, the nurses made all the kids learn sign language in advance. Some couldn’t sit still and blamed it all on her. Right from the start, no one liked her.
She liked wearing a wrinkled white linen dress, always carrying a sketchbook with a pencil clipped inside.
The first time she walked into the classroom, the kids were so startled by her appearance they froze in place and immediately fell silent. Her whole body was deathly pale—even her hair and eyelashes were white. She looked completely different from anyone they’d ever seen.
The classroom window was open. In the sunlight pouring in, she kept her eyes downcast, as if she couldn’t open them. People with albinism had sensitivity to light.
She stepped onto the platform with her eyes closed and almost tripped. As laughter erupted around her, she stood back up and quietly wrote something in her sketchbook.
Then, under the strange gazes of the children, she turned the sketchbook around to face the class. The kids squinted at the words written in wobbly pencil:
—Kong Youling.
That was her name.
Her eyes were still shut from the sunlight, yet she tilted her head up as much as she could. The teacher never closed the curtains, just laughed along with the kids.
She was deaf and couldn’t hear the mocking laughter. In the sunlight, she squinted open her eyes and saw the smiling faces, thinking they must really like her.
So even though she didn’t like to smile, didn’t really know how, she still lifted the corners of her mouth ever so slightly.
Forcing out a little smile.
That day, Ji Minghuan, sitting in the corner of the classroom, paused for a moment. The girl smiled alone in the sunlight, her snow-white hair swaying gently in the breeze. He didn’t laugh, didn’t speak—just quietly watched her.
Ji Minghuan knew well enough—she could’ve just had the teacher write her name on the board. She didn’t need to do that herself.
Later, Ji Minghuan asked her why she did it that way. She wrote in her notebook that she didn’t like others learning sign language just because of her—it made her feel like a burden.
She was a considerate child, never wanting to trouble others.
But even so, the kids often gave her a hard time. They all knew the nurses made them learn sign language not for her, but just to keep them from messing around in class—something else to occupy them.
No one dared to mess with the nurses, so they picked on the white-haired girl. Some said she was a freak even her mom didn’t want, thrown away for being too ugly. Others said she was the child of a foreigner who used her mom and abandoned them both.
Someone even said she was a demon, that demons had red eyes. They didn’t know it was just because her irises were semi-transparent from a lack of pigment, which made her pupils look red to others.
She couldn’t hear what they said, so she wrote in her notebook. But no one responded.
She once wrote halfway: “Do you want to play with me?”
That was when Ji Minghuan suddenly stood up in the corner of the classroom and took her hand to run.
They ran fast, like they were riding a gust of wind. The other kids chased after them but couldn’t catch up. In the end, the two of them hid in the attic above the library. The kids in the Orphanage didn’t dare go there—it was where the headmaster punished people. They were all afraid the nurses would lock them inside, so no one followed.
In the quiet attic, the only sound was the ticking of the wall clock. Ji Minghuan climbed a mountain of old books stacked high, stepped onto the top of the bookshelf, and leapt toward the skylight, climbing onto the roof. Then he turned and reached a hand down to her.
The girl looked up at him. The sunlight that day was intense, and the light pouring from the skylight made it hard for her to open her eyes, but she blinked through it and looked seriously at the boy’s smile and the hand he extended.
She hesitated for a second, then... she ran.
It was the first time Ji Minghuan saw her run.
She ran fast, her pale legs rising and falling, light-footed like a white deer crossing a river. She stepped across two or three increasingly tall bookshelves, leapt into the light toward the skylight.
Ji Minghuan grabbed her hand and pulled her onto the roof.
That evening, the two children sat shoulder to shoulder on the rooftop bathed in twilight, watching the sun slowly sink beyond the horizon. Ji Minghuan had read a lot and knew people with albinism were sensitive to light, so he gently placed a book—randomly picked up from the attic—on her head.
Under the book’s shadow, she opened her eyes and quietly studied the boy who usually didn’t talk much.
“Kong Youling, your name sounds really nice.” The boy took her sketchbook without asking and wrote in it with a pencil.
“You don’t hate me? I can’t speak, and I can’t hear anything.” The white-haired girl wrote in the notebook. “I’m also... really ugly.”
The book still balanced on her head, like a little frog hiding under a lotus leaf.
Ji Minghuan took her notebook and pencil, wrote something down, and handed it back.
On the page were a few neat words: “You’re not ugly at all.”
Kong Youling looked down at it, then wrote again: “But... everyone hates me.”
She thought for a moment, then kept writing. Finally, she turned the notebook toward Ji Minghuan:
“Is it because I’m disabled?”
Ji Minghuan stared at those words, stunned for a long while.
He took the notebook and wrote in it, then quickly turned the page to her: “You’re disabled? Well, I’m mentally ill!”
At that, he mischievously blinked like a puppy. “I’m telling you, I often see weird things—sometimes it’s me in World War II, soldiers around me yelling in a language I don’t understand, sometimes it’s me playing violin on a street in Paris while people applaud, and sometimes... sometimes I see myself destroying the world! I dream I’m sitting on the moon, staring at an empty Earth, and I raise my right hand—black bandages like giant snakes coil around the entire planet, and then...”
Kong Youling blinked and wrote in the notebook: “And then?”
“And then I swallowed the Earth whole!” He let out a few smug hums and wrote it in the notebook with exaggerated seriousness.
“You’re amazing.”
“Right? Right?” Ji Minghuan scribbled, his crooked handwriting full of unexplainable pride.
That year, Kong Youling was 8, and Ji Minghuan was one year older—just 9. The two kids sat on the roof’s edge, gazing at the crimson sky, contrails from planes drifting over their heads.
The sun dipped below the horizon, taking the last light with it. In the pitch-black night where you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face, Ji Minghuan held himself up on the rooftop tiles and looked up at the sky.
The first silver moonlight shone down over him. He mouthed silently with his lips:
“We’re the same, both weirdos... You’re not alone.”