Chapter 1

Death takes one by complete surprise. A moment before being jolted awake, Dalie had been sleeping in a first-class cabin. To ensure better sleep quality, she always took melatonin, wore an eyemask, and popped in earplugs. Thus, it was only when the distant clamor grew into an escalating crescendo of shrieks that Dalie was finally startled awake. By the time she pulled off her eyemask, the cabin was tilting sharply to one side. Loose items rolled down the aisle, and the immediate threat of death set her nerves on edge. The next second, the plane plummeted toward the strait, and her consciousness went pitch black. Regaining awareness, Dalie felt a dull, thumping ache in her head. She opened her eyes, sat up slowly, and blinked blankly at her surroundings. The room was exceedingly dark, heavy with the cold, damp stench of rotting wood. The mattress beneath her was thin; to the touch, it felt like genuine cotton fabric, though low-count and coarse. The wooden bed creaked softly with every movement as she sat up. Directly in front of the single bed, two six-pane wooden glass windows were draped with ruffled lace curtains heavy with classical nostalgia. An unlit, delicate glass-hooded gas lamp sat on the sill, leaving the room shrouded in gloom. Beyond the window, the faint blue light of dawn—characteristic of that hour just before morning breaks—filtered into the narrow alley. This was no hospital. After a long pause, Dalie snapped out of her daze. It seemed this was no longer the world she knew. Panicking, she lowered her head and ran her hands over herself. Her thin, bony frame was clad in a high-collared cotton nightgown. Inelastic long stockings wrapped around her feet, her long hair was tied with ribbons into curls, and a nightcap edged with embroidered lace sat atop her head. She was covered by a deflated cotton quilt that failed to stop the cold air from seeping through every gap. Every single detail confirmed her internal suspicion: This was not her body. It seemed that following the plane crash, she had died and transmigrated—her stray soul left behind in England. Dalie sat dazed on the small wooden bed, staring out the window and letting the overwhelming influx of information surge through her mind. These memories belonged to someone else. Dalie Nash. The pronunciation of the name was remarkably similar to her own. However, the original owner of this body was born in the 1860s at Ponsor Clinic in London's Whitechapel district. She was fifteen years old, living at B25 Clark Street, Whitechapel, East London. Currently a day student at Stepney Girls' School, today was Saturday—a day off. Dalie continued sifting through the young girl's memories. Born and raised in the East End, Dalie was the eldest daughter, sharing this small house—rented for five pounds a month—with her parents and grandparents. She had a ten-year-old sister named Penny, who was currently asleep in the same room, on the adjacent bed. The memories were straightforward. Her family of six all scraped by in the eastern part of the metropolis, earning meager wages to survive. Her grandfather, Hank, and father, Fred, were both milkmen, pounding the pavement day in and day out for a dairy factory and managing only six or seven hours of sleep. Her mother, Mary, stayed home full-time, taking in neighbors' infants and tending to babies from dawn till dusk. Her sister Penny attended a nearby free school—a face-saving initiative forced by the Home Office that mandated school-age children to study rather than engage in child labor. Their neighborhood was strictly targeted as a model district. The matriarch and head of the household was Grandmother Liza, who operated a small grocery store out of their home, picking up scraps of business left over by the larger grocery stores across the street. Her grandparents also had a daughter a few years younger than her father—Aunt Reece—who was married to a subway trackman. Everyone held ordinary jobs and lived ordinary lives. The grocery store's income served as the main financial pillar of the household, funding the original Dalie's attendance at a girls' school that cost ten shillings a week. The turning point occurred half a month ago. As usual, Liza had gone out in the pre-dawn hours to purchase black-market tobacco and alcohol at Spitalfields Market. On her way home, she accidentally stumbled upon a murder scene: a woman's body dumped in a narrow alley near Whitechapel, butchered beyond recognition. In December's icy London, Liza slipped and broke a bone on the spot. An acquaintance in the alley rushed her to the clinic and reported the crime to the police. Afterwards, the orthopedic doctor at Ponsor Clinic strictly ordered her to remain on bed rest for two months. Meanwhile, the case Liza witnessed had escalated severely and was now under investigation by Whitehall Police Headquarters. Wait... why does this story sound so familiar? Suddenly, it hit her. It all came rushing back. She had transmigrated into a book! And a literary classic, no less! Back when foreign trade was booming, Dalie had painfully re-learned English to expand her client base, reading the original English text of this very novel. The protagonist was a impoverished child living in London's East End who had suffered from starvation and abuse from a young age. Forced into a life of crime, he became a master thief, went to prison, and subsequently broke out. In the East End, where danger and opportunity went hand in hand, the protagonist made his fortune through shady, underworld avenues. Once wealthy, he rebranded himself, washed his hands of his past, entered high society, became a glovemaker, and reached the pinnacle of life. In the end, the protagonist moved from prosperity to ruin, becoming the very first egg crushed beneath the falling tree. The original owner of this body was merely background scenery—a random extra. Because her grandmother was injured and the shop fell into chaos under the rest of the family's management, the family could no longer afford Stepney Girls' School. The original Dalie withdrew six months early and took a job as a post office typist through her principal's recommendation. Later, as her grandmother fell critically ill, she hastily married a co-worker. Unsurprisingly, her marriage turned miserable within a few years. She spent her days fretting over the family's basic needs; whenever her husband got drunk, he beat her from one wall to the other. One day, unable to endure it any longer, she drove a butter knife into his throat. She ended up in Newgate Prison. During her time there, she had a brief encounter with the teenage protagonist during his first arrest. As a pitiful, tragic middle-aged woman, her plight ignited the boy's survival instinct, driving him to break out of prison. Later, she was sentenced to hang by a judge, dying at the mere age of thirty. Sorting through the original host's memories, Dalie quickly realized she had transmigrated to a timeline more than a decade before the hanging. The original Dalie had not yet become a post office typist, nor was she married. Right now, she stood at the exact crossroads where Liza’s injury and the shop's failing business were forcing her to abandon her education prematurely. She had been attending Stepney Girls' School since she was thirteen. For someone living on Clark Street, the tuition was far from cheap: ten shillings a week amounted to two pounds a month—half the monthly rent of their house, excluding food and textbooks. The curriculum covered spelling, arithmetic, bookkeeping, shorthand, proofreading, and telegraphy, alongside electives in French, German, and Spanish—all highly practical skills. The program lasted three years, after which the school assisted with job placements, targeting companies in need of female clerks. Grandmother Liza Nash had not spent this money in vain. She hoped Dalie would become a respectable typist, telegraph operator, or secretary. Working in an office without having to perform dirty manual labor was, to Liza, the ultimate sign of respectability. Thirty years ago, Liza and Hank had fled the Irish Famine for London, spending three grueling years shoveling cow dung on a farm in South London. Perhaps Liza wished to spare her descendants from shoveling dung—or perhaps she hoped Dalie might use her position to snag a husband earning dozens of pounds a month. If she pulled that off, the family would escape poverty, join the middle class, and finally allow Liza to hold her head high before the neighbors. Word had it that lawyers and doctors earning tens of pounds a month favored pretty secretaries and typists. Lured by such prospects, Liza hadn't blinked an eye at shelling out ten shillings a week. Yet she could never have anticipated that plans fall short of reality. Dalie pulled the covers back over herself, staring up at the ceiling with a heavy heart. Realizing that ten years of hard work in her past life had been reset to zero, it took her a long time to process the shock. Before transmigrating, she was the CEO of a retail brand, heading to London on a business trip before perishing at just twenty-five. How had she become a CEO at twenty-five? The story began when Dalie was fifteen. It was an Olympic year, and she was just a small-town girl. Her father had died, her mother had run off, and she lived with her grandmother running a small corner store. Despite the bleak circumstances, her grandmother was a formidable woman. While running the store, she set up a mahjong table at the front door. In a single morning, she could make a month's worth of Dalie's living expenses. She taught Dalie to rely on her own talents—starting with learning how to spot card sharps. So, at sixteen, Dalie dropped out of school, raided her grandmother’s life savings, and teamed up with relatives to run wholesale goods, starting a tiny company. Raised to be bold and relentlessly fierce in her work, she dared to spend ten thousand when she only had a hundred. Yet she possessed a natural sensitivity to data and information. Her grasp of accounts was second to none; she was an extraordinarily fast learner, possessed sharp observation skills, enjoyed great luck, and was backed by the wind of the era. No matter how stagnant a product was, once she restructured its sales strategy, it inevitably roared back to life. Riding the wave of the early internet boom, the business snowballed. Within a few years, her company achieved massive scale across the province. By twenty-three, Dalie had her own subsidiary, serving as CEO overseeing a convenience store brand with over a hundred locations statewide. Over those ten years, driven by ambition, she went back to school: learning languages, studying business, and catching up on all the reading she had missed—including the original English text of that classic novel. Six months before her transmigration, her grandmother—who had been enjoying her golden years atop a pile of money—passed away suddenly. The blow hit hard. To distract herself, Dalie threw herself into relentless business trips and overseas market research to scout new projects. She had to exhaust herself completely just to sleep at night. She never expected that the astronomical improbability of an air crash would actually happen to her. Still, this Dalie Nash seemed to share a mysterious kinship with her. At the very least, both of their families ran grocery stores. Dalie thought bitterly, feeling increasingly despondent. Shaking her head, she simply pulled the blanket over her head and drifted into a hazy sleep. This body was healthy and unexhausted, capable of eating well and sleeping soundly, making it easy to fall asleep. In her half-slumber, Dalie caught the faint rustle of sleet tapping against the eaves outside, accompanied by the muffled footsteps of neighbors passing through the alleyway.