Princess of the 19th Century Department Store - Chapter 1

Chapter 1

Death came without warning.

One moment before the noise jolted Daisy awake, she had been sleeping in first class.

For the sake of getting better rest, she always had to take melatonin, put on an eye mask, and wear earplugs.

So through the haze, it was the swelling clamor around her-the screams growing louder and more frantic-that finally startled Daisy awake.

By the time she pulled off her eye mask, the cabin was already tilting sharply to one side.

Everything in the cabin was rolling down the aisle. The threat of death stabbed at her nerves.

The next second, the plane plunged toward the strait, and she lost consciousness completely.

…

When awareness returned, Daisy felt a dull ache throbbing in her head.

She opened her eyes, slowly sat up, and stared around in confusion at everything around her.

The room was terribly dim. The smell of damp, rotting wood hung in the cold air.

The mattress beneath her was thin as well. It felt like genuine cotton cloth, but the thread count was low, making it rather coarse.

As she sat up, the wooden bed gave a soft creak, creak.

Directly in front of the single bed, two six-pane wooden glass windows were covered by classical-looking lace curtains with curled edges.

A delicate gas lamp with a glass shade sat on the windowsill, unlit, leaving the room very dark.

Through the window came the faint blue light of a narrow alley at the hour just before dawn.

This was not a hospital.

After a long while, Daisy finally snapped out of her daze.

It seemed this was no longer the world she knew, either.

In a panic, she lowered her head and felt herself all over.

A skinny, slender body. A long cotton nightgown with a ruffled collar. Long stockings with no stretch at all wrapped around her feet. Long hair tied into curls with ribbons. An embroidered lace-trimmed nightcap on her head.

A cotton quilt that had long since lost its fluffiness covered her, but the cold air still seeped in from every direction.

Every detail confirmed the suspicion in her mind.

This was not her body.

Apparently, after the plane accident, she had died-and transmigrated. Her wandering soul had been left in England.

At that moment, Daisy sat blankly on the little wooden bed and stared at the window, letting an overloaded flood of information churn through her mind.

These were someone else’s memories.

Daisy. Nash.

The pronunciation of the name really was quite similar to her own.

However, the owner of this body had been born in the 1860s at Ponsor Clinic in Whitechapel District, London.

She was fifteen this year and lived at Building B25, Clark Street, Whitechapel District, East End, London.

At present, she was a day student at Stepney Girls’ School. Today was Saturday, and there was no school.

Daisy continued reading through the identity information of this half-grown girl in her memories.

She had been born and raised in the East End. She was the eldest daughter in the family and lived with her parents and grandparents in this little house, which cost five pounds a month in rent.

She also had a younger sister, Penny, who was sleeping in the same room right now, in the bed beside hers.

The memories were very simple. Her family had six people, all making a living in East London, earning meager wages to get by.

Her grandfather Hank and her father Fred were both milkmen, working for a dairy as they went from street to street and house to house all day. They could only sleep six or seven hours a day.

Her mother Mary stayed at home full-time, caring for babies for the neighbors, spending every day looking after children.

Her younger sister Penny was ten this year and attended the free school near their home.

This was the result of the Home Office’s face-saving project, which forced school-age children to attend school instead of working as child laborers. The block where they lived had been singled out as a model case and was being strictly watched.

As for her grandmother Lisa, she was the one who had the final say in the family. She ran a small grocery shop out of the house, scraping up the leftover business from the large grocery stores across the street.

Her grandfather and grandmother also had a daughter, a few years younger than her father, who had married an Underground line worker. Daisy called her Aunt Reese.

Everyone had ordinary jobs and ordinary lives.

The grocery shop’s income was already the family’s main financial support, paying for the original body’s education at a Girls’ School with tuition of ten shillings a week.

But an accident had happened half a month ago.

As usual, Lisa had gone to Spitalfields Market before dawn to purchase tobacco and alcohol through private channels.

On her way home, she accidentally witnessed the scene of a murder.

A woman’s corpse had been dumped in a narrow street near Whitechapel, mangled beyond recognition.

In London in December, the ground was covered in snow and ice.

Lisa was so frightened that she fell on the spot and broke a bone.

An acquaintance from that alley sent her to a clinic and reported the crime.

Afterward, the bone specialist at Ponsor Clinic ordered her to remain in bed at home for two months…

And the case Lisa had accidentally witnessed was currently causing a serious uproar, with Whitehall Police Headquarters in charge of the investigation.

Wait. Why did this story feel somewhat familiar?

Suddenly, Daisy remembered. She remembered everything.

She had transmigrated into a book!

And into a literary classic, no less.

Back when foreign trade had just started booming, Daisy had painstakingly relearned English in order to develop clients, and she had read the original English version of this novel.

The protagonist of the book was an impoverished child living in the East End, London. Since childhood, he had never had enough to eat, had been abused, and had been forced to become a notorious thief. He had gone to prison, then escaped.

In the East End, London, danger and opportunity emerged endlessly in equal measure. The protagonist made his fortune through gray, underground channels that could not bear the light of day.

After getting rich, he transformed himself, whitewashed his past, began moving in high society, acted as a fixer for others, and reached the pinnacle of his life.

In the end, sure enough, the original novel’s protagonist went from splendor to decline, becoming the first insect egg crushed beneath the toppling of a great tree.

And the original owner of this body was merely set dressing in the novel-a nameless passerby in the background.
Because her grandmother had been injured and the family had made a complete mess of managing the shop, they could no longer afford to keep her at Stepney Girls’ School.

The original Daisy had withdrawn half a year early and, through an introduction from the headmistress, gone to work at the post office as a typist.

Later, when her grandmother became critically ill, she hastily started a family with one of her coworkers. But after several years of marriage, her home life was far from happy.

Day in and day out, she had to worry about food, clothing, and every daily necessity for the whole household. And when her husband occasionally got drunk, he would beat her from one wall to the other.

One day, the original Daisy finally couldn’t take it anymore and drove a dinner knife into his throat.

In the end, she was locked up in Newgate Prison.

There, the original Daisy had a brief encounter with the young protagonist after his first arrest.

As a pitiful, tragic middle-aged woman, she stirred the young protagonist’s will to survive and helped him escape from prison.

Afterward, the original Daisy was sentenced to hang by the judge. She was only thirty when she died.

…

After sorting through the original Daisy’s memories, Daisy quickly realized that she seemed to have transmigrated to a point in the timeline more than ten years before the hanging.

The original Daisy had not yet become a typist at the post office, nor had she gotten married.

Right now, Lisa’s injury and the poor state of the family’s grocery shop were forcing the original Daisy to end her schooling early.

Since the age of thirteen, she had been attending Stepney Girls’ School in the East End, London.

For people living on Clark Street, this school was not cheap.

Tuition was ten shillings a week, which came to two pounds a month.

That was almost half a month’s rent, and it did not include meals or books.

The main courses taught spelling, arithmetic, bookkeeping, shorthand, proofreading, and sending and receiving telegrams. Students could also choose French, German, or Spanish as electives. They were all the most practical subjects of the day.

The program lasted three years in total. After graduation, the school could help recommend students for jobs, mainly at companies and institutions that needed large numbers of female clerks.

The original Daisy’s grandmother, Lisa Nash, was not spending this money for nothing.

She hoped that Daisy could one day become a respectable typist, telegraph operator, receptionist, or perhaps even a secretary.

To Lisa, being able to work in an office without doing dirty or backbreaking labor was already extremely respectable.

Thirty years ago, Grandmother Lisa and Grandfather Hank had come to London because of the famine in Ireland, then spent three years digging cow dung on a farm in South London.

Perhaps she simply did not want her descendants to go on digging cow dung too.

Or perhaps she hoped Daisy could use the convenience of her position to find a husband earning dozens of pounds a month.

If she managed that, their family could rise out of poverty in one leap and become middle class. At last, Lisa would be able to hold her head high before the neighbors.

Word had it that lawyers and doctors earning dozens of pounds a month these days loved marrying pretty female secretaries or typists.

So with such enticing prospects before her, Lisa paid the ten-shilling weekly tuition without so much as blinking.

But she probably never imagined what would happen afterward. Man proposes; God disposes.

…

Daisy lay back down and stared at the ceiling with a complicated feeling in her chest.

After realizing that ten years of hard work from her previous life had been reset to zero with a single click, she needed half a day just to recover.

Before transmigrating, she had been the CEO of a retail brand and was on her way to London for a business trip. She had been only twenty-five when she died.

Why had she become a CEO at twenty-five?

The story began when Daisy was fifteen.

It was an Olympic year, and she was still a small-town girl.

Her father was dead, her mother had run off, and she depended on her maternal grandmother for survival. Together, they ran a little convenience store.

Though the situation looked miserable, her grandmother was remarkably capable. While running the shop, she also set up a table by the entrance and hosted mahjong games.

In a single morning, she could earn Daisy a month’s living expenses. She also taught Daisy that she had to learn real skills herself-starting, at the very least, with how to cheat at mahjong.

So when Daisy was sixteen, she dropped out of school, dug into her grandmother’s funeral savings, and followed relatives into wholesale trading and freight runs, eventually setting up a small company.

Raised by her grandmother, Daisy had guts. When she worked, she fought like her life depended on it. If she had a hundred, she dared to spend ten thousand. On top of that, she was naturally sensitive to information and numbers.

Not only was no one better than her at calculating precise accounts, she also learned extremely fast, had sharp powers of observation, good luck, and the times on her side.

No matter how bad a product’s prospects seemed, once she turned it over in her hands and found a way out, she could always bring it back to life.

As she kept doing business and rode the rising wave of the internet, the snowball grew larger and larger.

Within a few years, her company had reached a considerable scale in her province.

By the time she was twenty-three, Daisy had her own subsidiary, had become CEO, and was managing a convenience store brand with over a hundred locations across the province.

During those ten years, in order to develop further, she had gone back and remade herself from scratch-learning languages, studying business, and making up for all the books she had never read.

That included chewing her way through the original text of that famous novel.

Half a year before she transmigrated, her grandmother, who had been comfortably enjoying retirement in a pile of money, suddenly passed away.

The blow came without warning.

To distract herself, Daisy began traveling constantly for work, researching overseas markets and planning to find new projects.

Only by exhausting herself completely could she rest with any peace of mind.

She simply had not expected something as unlikely as a plane crash to happen to her of all people.

Still, this Daisy Nash seemed, in some mysterious way, to share many similarities with her.

At the very least, both their families ran grocery shops.

Thinking this bitterly, Daisy grew even more despairing. She shook her head, gave up entirely, pulled the blanket over herself, and muddled through a short nap.

This body was very healthy and had never really been overworked. It could eat, sleep, and grow drowsy with remarkable ease.

Half-asleep, Daisy vaguely heard fine pellets of snow rustling against the eaves outside, and the heavy footsteps of neighbors passing through the alley.