Death came without any warning.
The moment before she was woken up, Dolly was still sleeping in first class.
For better sleep quality, she always had to take melatonin and wear an eye mask and earplugs.
So, it was only when the surrounding clamor and escalating screams pierced through the haze that Dolly was startled awake.
By the time she took off her eye mask, the plane’s cabin was already tilting sharply to one side.
All sorts of objects were rolling down the aisle, and the threat of death electrified her nerves.
The next second, the plane plunged toward the channel, and she lost consciousness completely.
…
When she regained consciousness, Dolly felt a dull ache in her head.
She opened her eyes, slowly sat up, and looked around in a daze, taking in her surroundings.
The room was exceedingly dim, and the smell of damp, rotting wood permeated the cold air.
The mattress pad beneath her was also thin. It felt like genuine cotton, but the thread count was low, making it somewhat coarse.
As she sat up, the wooden bed creaked softly.
Directly in front of the single bed, scalloped lace curtains covered two six-pane wooden windows.
A delicate, glass-shaded gas lamp sat on the windowsill. The lamp wasn’t lit, leaving the room very dark.
Through the window, the blue light of the hour just before dawn faintly filtered in from the narrow alley outside.
This was not a hospital.
After a long moment, Dolly snapped out of her daze.
It seemed this was no longer the world she was familiar with.
She frantically looked down, her hands exploring her entire body.
It was a slender, bony body, dressed in a long cotton nightgown with a ruffled collar. Inelastic long stockings were wrapped around her feet, and her long hair was tied into curls with a ribbon, topped with an embroidered, lace-trimmed nightcap.
The quilt covering her was no longer fluffy, and the cold air seeped in from everywhere.
Every single detail confirmed the suspicion in her mind.
This was not her body.
It seemed that after the plane crash, she had died and transmigrated, her lonely, wandering soul left behind in England.
At this moment, Dolly sat dazedly on the small wooden bed, staring at the window, letting the overwhelming flood of information churn in her mind.
These were the memories of another person.
Delia Nash.
The pronunciation of the name was actually quite similar to her own.
However, the owner of this body was born in the 1860s, in the Pangsuo Clinic in London’s Whitechapel District.
She was fifteen years old and lived at B25 Clark Street in the Whitechapel District of East London.
She was currently a day student at Stepney Girls’ School. Today was Saturday, so there was no school.
Dolly continued to read through the identity information of this teenage girl in her memory.
Born and raised in the East End, she was the eldest daughter of the family, living with her parents and grandparents in this small house that cost five pounds a month to rent.
She also had a younger sister, Penny, who was sleeping in the same room as her right now, in the adjacent bed.
The contents of the memory were quite simple. She had a family of six, all of whom eked out a meager living in the eastern part of the metropolis.
Her grandfather, Hank, and her father, Fred, were both milkmen, working for a dairy and walking the streets and alleys all day, getting only six or seven hours of sleep each night.
Her mother, Mary, was a full-time homemaker who looked after the neighbors’ babies, spending her entire day taking care of children.
Her younger sister, Penny, was ten years old and attended a free school near their home.
This was a compulsory measure, a face-saving project by the Home Office that required school-aged children to be educated and not employed as child laborers. The neighborhood they lived in was being strictly monitored as a model case.
Her grandmother, Lisa, was the decision-maker of the family. She ran a small grocery shop out of their home, picking up the scraps of business left by the several larger grocery stores across the street.
Her grandfather and grandmother also had a daughter, a few years younger than her father, who was married to a subway lineman. They called her Aunt Rissie.
They were all ordinary people with ordinary jobs and ordinary lives.
The income from the grocery shop was already the main economic pillar of the family, supporting the original Delia’s attendance at a girls’ school that cost ten shillings a week in tuition.
However, an accident had occurred half a month ago.
As usual, Lisa had gone to a private supplier at Spitalfields Market in the early morning to stock up on tobacco and alcohol.
On her way home, she accidentally witnessed a murder scene.
A woman’s mutilated corpse had been dumped in a narrow street near Whitechapel.
It was December in London, and the ground was covered in ice and snow.
Lisa was so frightened that she fell and fractured a bone.
She was taken to the clinic by an acquaintance from that alley, and a report was filed with the police.
Subsequently, the orthopedic doctor at Pangsuo Clinic ordered her to be on bed rest at home for two months…
And the case Lisa had accidentally witnessed was now escalating in severity and was being investigated by the Whitehall General Police Bureau.
Wait, why did this story feel somewhat familiar?
Suddenly, Dolly remembered. She remembered everything.
She had transmigrated into a book!
And it was a literary classic, no less.
Back when foreign trade was just beginning to take off, Dolly had painstakingly relearned English to develop clients and had read the original English version of this novel.
The protagonist of the book was a destitute child living in London’s East End. Starving and abused from a young age, he was forced to become a master thief, had been in and out of prison, and had escaped again.
In the East End of London, danger and opportunity were equally abundant. The protagonist made his fortune through shady, under-the-table means.
After making his fortune, he transformed himself, whitewashing his past and beginning to move in high society, becoming a “glove” for others and reaching the pinnacle of his life.
In the end, as expected, the original protagonist’s journey from prosperity to decline culminated in him becoming the first insect egg to be crushed when the great tree fell.
And the original Delia Nash was merely a part of the background in this novel, a passerby in the setting.
Because her grandmother was injured and the family was mismanaging the shop, they could no longer afford to send her to Stepney Girls’ School.
The original Delia dropped out six months early and, through an introduction from the headmistress, became a typist at the post office.
Later, as her grandmother’s illness became critical, she hastily married a colleague. However, after a few years of marriage, her family life was not a happy one.
She had to worry about the food, clothing, and shelter for her entire family, young and old, day in and day out. Occasionally, when her husband got drunk, she would be beaten from one wall to the other.
One day, the original Delia simply couldn’t take it anymore and plunged a dinner knife into his throat.
In the end, she was locked up in Newgate Prison.
In Newgate Prison, the original Delia had a brief encounter with the young protagonist, who had been caught for the first time.
As a pitiful and tragic middle-aged woman, she sparked the young protagonist’s will to survive and helped him escape from prison.
Later, the original Delia was sentenced to be hanged by the judge and died at the age of thirty.
…
After sorting through the original Delia’s memories, Dolly quickly realized that she seemed to have transmigrated to a point in time more than a decade before the hanging.
The original Delia hadn’t gone to work as a typist at the post office yet, nor was she married.
Right now was the critical juncture where, due to Lisa’s injury and the poor management of the family’s grocery shop, the original Delia was on the verge of having to end her schooling prematurely.
She had been attending Stepney Girls’ School in London’s East End since she was thirteen.
For someone living on Clark Street, this school was not cheap.
The weekly tuition was ten shillings, which amounted to two pounds a month.
That was equivalent to half a month’s rent, and it didn’t even include the cost of meals and books.
The main curriculum taught spelling, arithmetic, bookkeeping, shorthand, proofreading, and telegraphy. One could also take elective courses in French, German, and Spanish—all of which were the most practical skills at the time.
The program lasted for three years. After graduation, the school would help recommend jobs to companies and organizations that needed a large number of female clerks.
The original Delia’s grandmother, Lisa Nash, wasn’t just throwing this money away.
She hoped that Dolly could become a respectable typist, telegraph operator, receptionist, or even a secretary in the future.
To be able to work in an office, without having to do dirty, strenuous labor, was extremely respectable in Lisa’s eyes.
Thirty years ago, Grandmother Lisa and Grandfather Hank had come to London because of the Irish Famine and had spent three years shoveling cow dung on a farm in South London.
Perhaps she didn’t want her descendants to go back to shoveling cow dung.
Or perhaps she hoped that Delia could use the convenience of her position to find a husband with a monthly salary of several dozen pounds.
If she could find one, their family would be lifted out of poverty in one fell swoop and become a middle-class family, finally allowing her to hold her head high among the neighbors.
She had heard that lawyers or doctors earning dozens of pounds a month nowadays loved to find pretty female secretaries or typists.
Therefore, under such a tempting prospect, Lisa had paid the ten-shilling weekly tuition without batting an eye.
But she could not have foreseen what would happen next. Man proposes, God disposes.
…
Dolly lay back down, staring at the ceiling with complicated feelings.
It took her a good half a day to recover after realizing that her ten years of hard work in her previous life had been reset to zero.
Before she transmigrated, she was the CEO of a retail brand, on her way to London for a business trip. She was only twenty-five when she died.
Why could she become a CEO at twenty-five?
The story began when Dolly was fifteen.
It was an Olympic year, and she was just a small-town girl.
Her dad had died, her mom had run off, and she and her maternal grandmother depended on each other, running a small convenience store.
Although the situation seemed quite miserable, her grandmother was very capable. While running the store, she also set up a mahjong table at the entrance.
In a single morning, she could earn a month’s living expenses for Dolly. She also taught her that she had to develop her own skills, at least learning how to cheat at cards first.
And so, at the age of sixteen, Dolly dropped out of school, took her grandmother’s coffin money, and went into the wholesale business with relatives, starting a small company.
Raised by her grandmother to be bold, she was a desperate go-getter in her work. If she had a hundred, she dared to spend ten thousand, yet she was naturally sensitive to information and numbers.
Not only was she unparalleled in accounting, but she was also an extremely fast learner, observant, lucky, and the times were on her side.
No matter how sluggish a business was, as long as she took a look at it and found a way out, it could always be brought back from the dead.
As the business grew, feeding on the dividends of the newly rising internet, it snowballed.
In just a few years, the company had achieved a considerable scale in her home province.
By the age of twenty-three, Dolly had her own subsidiary company and became a CEO, managing a convenience store brand with over a hundred stores throughout the province.
During those ten years, in order to develop, she had gone back to the drawing board, learning languages and business, and reading all the books she had missed.
That included slogging through the original text of that famous novel.
Half a year before she transmigrated, her grandmother, who had been enjoying her golden years in a pile of money, suddenly passed away.
The blow was very sudden.
To distract herself, Dolly began to travel constantly for business, conducting research in overseas markets, planning to find more projects.
She had to exhaust herself completely before she could rest easy.
She just never expected that something with such low probability as a plane crash would happen to her.
However, this Delia Nash seemed to have many similarities with her, as if by some unseen design.
At the very least, both of their families ran a grocery shop.
Dolly thought bitterly, growing more desperate. She shook her head and simply lay flat, pulling the covers over her head and sleeping fitfully for a while.
This body was very healthy, not overdrawn in the slightest. It could eat and sleep well, and she grew drowsy with ease.
In a haze, Dolly could hear the rustle of sleet hitting the eaves outside and the heavy footsteps of neighbors passing through the alley.