After the rain, the morning sun emerged from the clouds, and the light shone through the glass, casting a colorful halo.
Elisa’s mind buzzed, her soul gradually merging with her body. She suddenly opened her eyes, first feeling her own heartbeat, the sound of “thump, thump” in her chest. Wasn’t she burned to death in a fire? Why could she still feel her heartbeat, and her hands…
Her fingernails were intact, like those of a beauty-fair as jade, slender knuckles-much like her old hands, but definitely not her own.
Getting up from the bed, Elisa looked down at her hands, then reached to touch her thigh, pinching herself in disbelief. It hurt. She wasn’t dreaming. She had died three years ago, and now she was alive once more.
Elisa took a deep breath, almost suffocating from the surrounding pungent smell of gas.
Hastily, she opened the door and windows, following the scent to the kitchen to shut off the gas valve.
Returning to the bedroom, Elisa stood in front of the dressing table, looking at the mirror. This wasn’t her face, but it bore a resemblance of five or six points, almost as good as her former self, perhaps even a bit more attractive.
Her complexion was sickly pale, with almond-shaped eyes, clear and bright gaze, dark hair falling behind her, her figure a bit too slender, but better than before-at least no stomach illness, no crippled hands or feet, and no enduring scars.
Elisa quickly surveyed the room, adjusting to her surroundings. Under the bed, there was an empty bottle of sleeping pills. Elisa picked it up and threw it into the trash, then straightened the sheets and found a cellphone under the pillow.
To understand a person, looking at their phone was undoubtedly the quickest method.
As soon as Elisa turned on her phone and connected to the internet, various messages immediately filled the screen.
“Stinking b*tch, why aren’t you dead yet?”
“Mistress, despicable person.”
“Powell’s mistress, are you finally going to die? The world is so vast, yet there’s no place for you, so just die, at least there’d be enough land to bury you.”
“How many people has Powell, this wretched woman, been kept by? How shameless can a woman be?”
“You’re wasting air by living, land by dying, and RMB by lingering between life and death. You should be crushed to dust and eaten by pigs.”
… The messages received on the phone were all kinds of insults and abuse, occupying the entire screen, with tens of thousands more on the other side of the web.
An indescribable sense of despair and sorrow arose from the depths of her heart. Uncomfortable, Elisa rubbed her chest. This pain came from the original body.
At the same time, the fragmented memory pieces in her mind slowly began to converge, forming into yellowed photographs, then evolving into comic strips, and finally turning into a movie playing out in her mind.
The original owner’s name was Aoife Reat, born into a poor family where boys were favored over girls. Her parents wanted her to work to support the family after completing junior high school.
She refused, crying and pleading with her parents, saying she could earn her own tuition and promised not to burden the family. Furthermore, she would send money home every month.
Her parents finally agreed.
So, for three years of high school, she worked and studied, sending what little money remained home to her vampire-like parents, while she pinched pennies, eating steamed bread and pickled vegetables.
During those three years of high school, when she was growing, she suffered severe malnutrition, becoming as skinny as a bean sprout.
She attended classes during the day and worked secretly until one or two in the morning, struggling to balance both. Under this high-intensity pressure, she had no extra time to review the complex high school curriculum, nor could she concentrate in class.
Her grades plummeted, and she didn’t even qualify for a second-tier university.
Her parents showed no compassion, scolding her as a waste of money. After three years of schooling, when she turned eighteen, they immediately found her a husband. He was a forty-year-old man with two children from a previous marriage and was well-off.
She was sold. The dowry of a hundred thousand dollars was sold to the parents, and after pretending to comply for two days, she fled when no one was paying attention.
Penniless, she wandered the city for two months, working as a dishwasher, cleaning toilets, and even washing feet at a massage parlor.
She wanted to earn money to retake the college entrance exam. But when she took the money to the school, the Powell family intercepted her at the school gate, in front of all the students and Teacher White, accusingher of being loose and claiming that the money in her hands was dirty, earned through selling her body.
Unable to defend herself, she endured the piercing gazes in a daze under the sun. At that moment, someone appeared and took her away, resolving the situation for her.
That person was a talent scout from X Entertainment, who immediately took a liking to her and wanted to sign her into the entertainment company for training and debut.
Grateful, the original owner didn’t hesitate and signed a contract without much consideration, spending $500, 000 to buy her for ten years.
She had never seen so much money before. She used $200, 000 to buy off the so-called family ties with the Powell family, and with the remaining $300, 000, she bought a small apartment.
Finally, she had a home…
However, life didn’t remain peaceful for long. The contract had serious drawbacks, and Aoife was forced to change her name to Elisa.
Too naive, she thought “Elisa” was just a regular stage name, but it turned into a shackle that bound her for life.
She became a substitute and was even handed over to the CEO of Snearl Group, Finn.
That year, Finn treated her well, taught her carefully, arranged for her to learn the violin, hired private tutors, and gradually transformed her from the weak and incompetent “Aoife” into the deceased “Elisa.”
The next turning point came a year ago when the original owner, upon realizing she was just a substitute, still willingly accepted it because she liked Finn.
But later, Finn casually wanted to give her to Hamish.
She tried to resist and struggled against Finn, even attempting to escape and commit suicide. In the end, she didn’t even have the right to die-she had offended Hamish, and Finn also abandoned her.
Previously, because of Finn, she had a relatively smooth start after her debut, but after Finn rejected her, the company also abandoned her.
Only then did she realize that the entertainment company had been a trap from the beginning, set by Finn, just waiting for her to fall into it.
Various scandals were piled on her-sugar daddies, affairs, being a mistress, plastic surgery…
Her hand holding the phone trembled. Elisa tapped into the most active messages on Twitter, the last tweet that the original owner posted before her death:
“I’m leaving.”
The comments were filled with all sorts of abuse, not much different from what she had just seen, and many people had been forcibly blocked by the system for their excessively offensive remarks.
Even more absurd was the latest tweet that reminded everyone of her birthday. She had just turned 21.
How desperate was this troubled Aoife? On her 21st birthday, she swallowed sleeping pills and turned on the gas at home, quietly falling asleep to commit suicide.
How desperate was she? She used two methods to ensure she wouldn’t survive.
A person can only change their name once in a lifetime. Even in death, she would still be Elisa. Who would remember that this foolish girl was once named Aoife?
Elisa’s heart twisted with pain as she looked at “Aoife” in the mirror.
With a hoarse voice, she whispered, “I’m sorry, Aoife…”