Li Wei slouched behind the cracked desk at the farthest corner of the lecture hall, his body present but his mind elsewhere. The professor's voice blurred into the background like static, drowned out by the buzz of conversation, ringing phones, and the occasional laugh from students who—unlike him—seemed to belong here.
He was invisible in plain sight. Not hated, not liked. Just… there.
In a class of over two hundred students, Li Wei was always among the last in grades, the first to be forgotten during group assignments, and the only one still using a hand-me-down phone with a cracked screen and barely functioning battery. His clothes were neat but plain, a size too big. His hair, always slightly too long, curled in awkward directions.
The only person who ever really talked to him was Zhang Bo—"Fatty," as everyone called him. Loud, constantly eating, and oddly charismatic, Zhang Bo was the kind of person who got on everyone's nerves but still got invited to every party. He didn't seem to care that Li Wei had nothing to offer—no social clout, no money, not even interesting opinions.
"You gotta stop looking like a ghost, bro," Bo said as they walked out of class. "I swear, I thought you phased through the door just now."
Li Wei shrugged. "Maybe I did."
"Don't start acting mysterious. You already failing calculus."
They stopped by a vendor selling deep-fried snacks, where Zhang Bo bought two sticks of oily meat and forced one into Li Wei's hand.
"Eat. You look like you'll pass out if the wind blows wrong."
They sat on a low concrete wall, eating in silence as the campus bustled around them. Couples walked hand-in-hand, groups of students laughed over shared memes, and club recruiters shouted into megaphones. This was the world Li Wei lived in—one that spun fast around him while he remained still.
That night, as he lay on his narrow dorm bed, he stared up at the cracked ceiling and wondered—not for the first time—if life would always be this dull. Not painful. Just… grey.
Little did he know, the cracks weren't just in the ceiling. They were in the world itself. And soon, something would slip through.