Ai Si was absolutely certain that she was dead now—
In the last moment of consciousness, she had been sitting on a mid-sized bus heading to a 5A scenic spot, part of a company-organized trip.
As the designer with the highest sales in the clothing design department, Ai Si had been invited to join this trip early on. She was engaging in pleasant conversation with the marketing director, enjoying the comfortable life befitting a successful person, each showing off their accomplishments.
In an instant, the bus suddenly overturned and plunged into a lake.
In the last second before losing consciousness, Ai Si was submerged in the freezing lake water, reaching out to grab the window-breaking hammer to save herself.
Obviously, she had failed.
Now, in a dark and cold room, not a single ray of light penetrated the darkness.
Ai Si could feel herself lying on a narrow iron bed's lower bunk. The room was bone-chillingly cold, with only a thin cotton blanket covering her. Around her and on the upper bunk, she could hear the slow, steady breathing of strangers in deep sleep.
The entire space was filled with a faint musty smell, mixed with the scents of hair oil, flour, and the ash from burned coal.
She could identify these smells thanks to the various exotic fragrances she had used in her previous life as a perfume enthusiast.
She figured she might have experienced something like in the movies – after death, her soul had transmigrated into a stranger's body.
Just now, when she raised her hand to touch her temple, she felt curly long hair, when in fact she should have had straight short hair.
At this moment, Ai Si dared not move, allowing the memories belonging to this stranger to flood her mind.
Eloise Zaniro.
That was her name. She was born in Ireland in the 1870s and had sailed to New York with her parents as a child.
Her parents were among the poorest bay workers, making a living by harvesting oysters. She had a thirteen-year-old brother named Thomas.
The original owner of this body was sixteen years old.
Two years ago, her parents had perished in turbulent waves while out at sea. With nowhere else to go, the siblings were taken in by their widowed aunt who lived in New York.
Eloise had just recently celebrated her birthday, and in the original body's memories, although physically frail, she had been free from illness.
How strange that she, who had died by drowning, would end up possessing this body?
Ai Si couldn't make sense of it. She scratched her head and lay back down, feeling utterly dejected, hoping this was just a dream.
After pondering for a while, searching through her mind for any recognition of the name Eloise, she suddenly felt it was familiar.
It seemed that in her previous life, while aimlessly browsing websites, she had skimmed through a foreign author's romance novel set in the late 19th century.
In that book, there was indeed a supporting character named Eloise who lived with her brother at her aunt's house – a perfect match.
Had she... transmigrated into a novel?
Ai Si wracked her brain trying to remember more, but it had been too long ago. Try as she might, she could only vaguely recall the book's contents.
In the story, the impoverished Eloise worked at the Litz Hotel on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan's core district, along with her aunt and cousin.
But the original Eloise had been blessed with good looks, and while working at the hotel, she encountered many wealthy foreign gentlemen. Relying on her beauty, she had hoped to change her dire circumstances by becoming a rich man's mistress.
However, the book merely mentioned in passing that she met a con man who led to her downfall into prostitution, ultimately forcing her to perform in risqué theater shows to maintain an affluent lifestyle.
Eloise had been nothing more than an insignificant background character in the book.
She was desperate, poor, vain, tragic, and unremarkable.
Just one of the many coworker extras in the female protagonist's story.
Ai Si couldn't understand why she had been made to transmigrate into Eloise's body. Was it perhaps to change the original's tragic fate?
Ai Si continued to lie there listlessly, clearly still unable to accept the reality of transmigration.
As someone who had also come from a poor background, Ai Si's parents had divorced in her previous life and both started new families, showing little generosity toward her. She had even had to take out loans to complete university.
Ai Si had worked her way up from a small mountain town to a top-tier city, later studying design abroad and joining a fashion brand, becoming a clothing designer with an annual salary of over a million.
Before the car accident, she had just taken out a loan to buy an eight-million-yuan apartment in the city center, barely having had time to warm the mattress.
Ai Si's heart grew cold at the thought.
Eloise, Ai Si.
The names sounded somewhat similar – was this fate? Was she destined to become Eloise?
Well then, she was Eloise now.
Her frail body seemed unable to bear such emotional pain, and gradually her mind succumbed to drowsiness, falling into a deep sleep.
Early morning, around quarter past six.
The morning light on 33rd Street was reflected by the fine white frost on the road, streaming through the window of the left-side apartment on the third floor of building forty-three.
Mrs. Terry usually woke up at this time. She climbed out of her bunk bed and put on a worn thin wool jacket with mended sleeves, bought second-hand and ill-fitting, making her frame appear gaunt.
Terry put on her shoes and filled the stove with the few remaining coal pieces. She struck a match to light it; last night's coal hadn't lasted two hours before burning out, leaving the room without warmth, bitingly cold.
Flour was running low, and they needed more coal. Terry rubbed her forehead, but at least payday was today, and Manager Pengole had promised her a fifty-cent raise last week.
Finally, it was the bubbling sound of potatoes cooking in the aluminum pan on the stove and their starchy aroma that woke Eloise.
She rubbed her sleepy eyes to see her cousin Louise climbing down from the upper bunk. Louise had a well-proportioned figure and ash-blonde hair, wearing a semi-worn cotton shirt and petticoat. Louise met Eloise's vacant gaze.
"Eloise, time to get up," Louise said with a yawn, gently reminding her.
"Alright," Eloise responded after a moment's hesitation, her speech slightly stumbling.
Eloise quickly threw back the covers and found a thin, long cotton-linen dress from the bedhead to put on.
In these times, the clothing of poor families had no sense of fashion, consisting mainly of dark-colored cotton dresses.
Eloise wore two petticoats underneath, topped with a slightly thicker puff-sleeved dress, and an old, thin wool double-buttoned vest over it.
Well, despite wearing three or four layers, none of the fabrics were particularly warm, and she was still cold.
The narrow room contained two double-decker iron bed frames. By the window, Eloise's brother Thomas slept in the upper bunk, with their aunt below.
Eloise's bed was against the wall, and last night her aunt's eight-year-old daughter Bella had slept beside her, which explained the breathing she had heard upon waking.
By her estimate, the room was less than twenty square meters yet housed five people, cramped like a dormitory. Besides the stove and dining table, there wasn't even space for chairs.
Eloise's gaze wandered around the room, noting the shoes clustered by the door – some leather, some cloth, and her own pair of flat leather shoes.
She observed the warped wooden floor, the yellowed wallpaper, the leaking window corner, the peeling paint on the window frame, and the narrow, thin iron beds.
By now everyone was up, silently dressing. Not wanting to appear unusual, Eloise averted her gaze as Louise lifted a worn tin kettle from beside the coal stove, poured half its contents into a basin, and dropped in a piece of fragrant soap, stirring it around.
The water immediately filled with bubbles, releasing a strong citrus scent.
Louise turned to her and said, "Little El, come wash your face. This soap was given to me by a female guest when I was cleaning her suite. It would cost several cents at least in the store."
Louise was two years older than Eloise, now eighteen and in the prime of youth. Her ash-blonde hair was braided and pinned at the back of her head, her small nose and delicate features giving her a refined appearance.
Being close in age and similar in temperament, Eloise knew the original body had a good relationship with her cousin. She managed a smile and nodded.
"I'm coming."
If her cousin was this beautiful, Eloise had some expectations for her own appearance as well.
Thomas was still crouching at the doorway, squinting as he put on his shoes. Though only thirteen, he already had a job delivering newspapers. He had recently started taking Bella along with him on his paper route.
Thomas was quite thin, with typical English features: thin lips, pale skin, and a face covered in freckles. His hair was as messy as a bird's nest from sleep. He had just hurriedly eaten a few boiled potatoes and was preparing to leave.
"Eat a bit more, Thomas. You're covering two neighborhoods today, aren't you?" Aunt Terry said while braiding Bella's hair, turning her head to address Thomas.
Thomas nodded, speaking with an Irish accent that Eloise found difficult to place: "Don't worry, Aunt. I can handle it." He was still a child, once quite mischievous, but after his parents' death, he had experienced hunger and now had no choice but to work to support himself.
Once Bella's hair was braided and she had eaten her potatoes, she put on her newspaper delivery bag. Thomas reluctantly led her out the door, giving instructions as they walked...
Eloise tried to maintain a low profile, quietly sitting by the stove and eating a slightly salted potato. The gnawing hunger in her stomach forced her to swallow it down.
Fifteen minutes later, Terry and Louise locked the apartment door, with Eloise following behind them as they trudged through ankle-deep snow toward Fifth Avenue.
In her predecessor's memories, her aunt, Louise, and herself all worked at the prestigious Ritz Hotel on Fifth Avenue.
Her aunt was a laundress, earning five dollars a week.
Her cousin Louise was a cleaner, earning four dollars and fifty cents a week.
Being young, Eloise's job was to clean fireplaces, working three half-days per week without lunch provided, earning one dollar per day, totaling three dollars weekly.
Thomas and Bella's newspaper delivery job earned them seventy cents a day between them, a figure that had been repeatedly cut down by the newsstand owner.
For this family of modest means, it took two people's wages just to cover rent and coal.
Another two people's wages were needed to buy enough food for the family.
Her predecessor had to give two dollars and fifty cents of her three-dollar weekly wage to her aunt, keeping only fifty cents for necessities.
Leaving 33rd Street, which was mostly apartments, the buildings became more diverse, and crowds began to gather.
Eloise looked up at the street-corner shops of New York that were already open, finding herself unable to look away as she slowed her pace.
Fabric shops, butcher shops, and candy stores with beautifully decorated vintage storefronts lined the streets. Inside, customers wore elaborate bustle dresses made of silk, women wore small bonnets, and men wore crisp worsted suits while smoking copper-stemmed pipes.
Slow-moving steam trolleys shared the road with jingling black-lacquered horse carriages.
Though the buildings weren't drastically different from those of later times, they possessed a distinct historical charm, appearing as picturesque as a postcard in the snowy cityscape.
This was truly the Gilded Age.
Eloise felt a surge of excitement at having survived, but when she reached into her petticoat pocket, she found only a few cold coins, all pennies, seemingly enough only for a piece of palm sugar, a box of matches, or a small jar of sea salt.
Her enthusiasm quickly deflated, and she obediently lowered her head to watch her step, hurrying to catch up with her cousin and aunt.
