My avatar is becoming the final boss

Chapter 16 Attic
Ji Minghuan sat quietly in the chair, staring at the dark isolation door without moving. After a while, he closed his eyes and slumped his shoulders, as if he had fallen asleep in the chair.

"I haven't seen her for a long time..." he thought.

These may be the longest five minutes in Ji Minghuan's life.

It felt like there was a clock ticking in his mind, the second hand moving slowly clockwise, circle after circle, and he couldn't wait for these meaningless five minutes to end;

But the clock was moving back quickly, taking him back to the past, the memories of when he was still in the orphanage.

When Ji Minghuan and Kong Youling first met, he was only nine years old.

It was one morning three years ago.

Ji Minghuan learned from the nurse that there was a new child at the orphanage. She was a mixed-race child, frighteningly white, and deaf-mute. Because of her, the nurse had made all the children learn sign language ahead of time. Some children, unable to sit still, blamed her for everything, and everyone took a dislike to her from the start.

She liked to wear a wrinkled white linen dress and hold a sketchbook with a pencil in it.

When she first entered the classroom, the children were startled by her appearance and fell silent. Her entire body was a sickly white, even her hair and eyelashes were white, unlike anyone they had ever seen.

The classroom window was open, and she lowered her eyes in the sunlight that streamed in, as if she couldn't open them because albinos have weak eyesight.

At that time, she walked up to the podium with her eyes closed and almost fell down. Amidst everyone's laughter, she stood up and then quietly wrote on the sketchbook by herself.

Then, under everyone's strange gazes, she turned the front of the sketchbook toward the classroom. The children looked closely and saw three crooked little words written in pencil on it:
——Kong Youling.

That was her name.

She still had her eyes closed to avoid the light, but she tilted her head back as high as she could. The teacher never closed the curtains, but just laughed with the children.

She was deaf and dumb, so she couldn't hear the shrill laughter. She opened her eyelids vaguely in the sunlight and saw the smiles on their faces. She thought everyone liked her very much.

So even though she didn't like to laugh and didn't know how to laugh, she still slightly raised the corners of her mouth.

Force a smile.

Ji Minghuan, sitting in the corner of the classroom that day, was stunned for a moment. The girl smiled alone in the sunlight, her snow-white hair swaying gently in the breeze. He didn't smile or speak, just looked at her quietly.

Ji Minghuan also knew that she could just ask the teacher to write her name on the blackboard, there was no need to do this.

Later, Ji Minghuan asked her why she did that. She wrote in a notebook that she didn't like others learning sign language for her alone, as it would make her a burden to others.

She is a very sensible child and doesn't like to trouble others.

But even so, the children often gave her a hard time, because they all knew that the nurses made them learn sign language just to stop them from making trouble in the classroom and to give them more things to do.

But no one dared to mess with the nurse, so they went to find the white-haired girl. Some said that she was a monster that her mother didn't want and was thrown away because she was too ugly. Others said that she was a foreigner's child and that the foreigner had played with her mother and then abandoned them.

Some people say that she is a devil, and that devils' eyes are all red. However, they don't know that this is because the lack of pigment makes the iris translucent, so her pupils appear red to others.

Until one day, the children blocked her in the classroom. She couldn't hear what others were saying, so she wrote on the notebook, but no one paid any attention to her. The children knew she couldn't hear, so they used the sign language they learned in the computer room to curse at her, making some obscene gestures at her, and some even shone a flashlight into her eyes.

She stood there blankly, the sketchbook in her hand almost falling to the ground.

There were words half written on the notebook: "Do you want to play with me?"

At that time, Ji Minghuan, who was sitting in the corner of the classroom, suddenly stood up, grabbed her hand and ran away.

They ran so fast, as if riding the wind. The children chased after them, but they couldn't catch up. Finally, they hid in the attic above the library. None of the children in the orphanage dared go there because it was where the director punished people. They were afraid of being locked up in there by the nurses, so they didn't chase them. In the quiet attic, only the wall clock ticked. Ji Minghuan stepped on the pile of old books to climb up the bookshelf, then stepped on the old bookshelf to jump to the skylight, climbed onto the roof, and then turned around and reached out to her.

The girl looked up at her. The sun was very strong that day and the light coming through the skylight made it difficult for her to open her eyes, but she opened her eyes with a trembling eyelid and looked intently at the boy's smile on the roof and his outstretched hand.

She hesitated for a moment, then...she ran.

That was the first time Ji Minghuan saw her running.

She ran very fast, her fair legs rising and falling, and her figure was as light and nimble as a white deer wading across a river. She stepped on two or three increasingly tall bookshelves and jumped towards the skylight in the sunlight.

Ji Minghuan took her hand and pulled her onto the roof.

That evening, the two children sat side by side on the rooftop, bathed in the afterglow, watching the sun slowly sink over the horizon. Ji Minghuan, a frequent reader, knew that albinos were sensitive to light, so she gently placed a book she had picked up from the attic on her head.

She opened her eyes in the shadow of the book and quietly looked at this man who usually didn't talk much.

"Kong Youling, your name is very nice." The boy took her sketchbook without permission and wrote on it with a pencil.

"Don't you hate me? I can't speak and I can't hear anything." The white-haired girl wrote on the notebook, "I look... and I'm ugly."

She had a book on her head to avoid the light, like a little frog hiding under a lotus leaf.

Ji Minghuan took her notebook and pen, wrote something, and then returned them to her.

Written on the notebook were a few neat words: "You are not ugly at all."

Kong Youling lowered his eyes and took a look, then wrote on the notebook: "But... everyone hates me."

After thinking for a while, she continued writing and then turned the notebook towards Ji Minghuan:
“Is it because I’m disabled?”

Ji Minghuan looked at the line of words and was stunned for a long time.

He took the girl's notebook, wrote on it, and then quickly turned the page towards her: "You are disabled, but I am still mentally ill!"

At this point, he blinked slyly like a puppy. "Let me tell you, I often see strange images. Sometimes I see myself participating in World War II, with soldiers around me shouting something at me. Sometimes I see myself playing the violin on the streets of Paris, and everyone applauds me. Sometimes I see... I see myself destroying the world! I dreamed that I was sitting on the moon, looking at the empty Earth. I stretched out my right hand, and black bandages wrapped around the entire planet like giant snakes, and then..."

Kong Youling was stunned for a moment and wrote on the notebook: "Then?"

"Then I will swallow the earth!" He hummed twice and wrote seriously in the notebook.

"You are so awesome."

"Is that so?" Ji Minghuan wrote, and there seemed to be an inexplicable sense of pride in the crooked words.

That year, Kong Youling was 8 years old, and Ji Minghuan was one year older than her, only 9 years old. The two children sat on the eaves, looking at the crimson sky in the distance, with airplane clouds passing over their heads.

The setting sun dipped toward the horizon, taking away the last ray of light from the sky. In the pitch-black darkness, Ji Minghuan supported himself on the roof tiles with both hands and looked up at the night sky.

The first ray of moonlight fell from above his head, and he said silently with his lips:
"We're all the same, we're all weird... You're not alone."

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(End of this chapter)