Chapter 1

Bo Li opened her eyes with a skull-splitting headache and found that she was wearing different clothes—a shirt, a vest, and long stockings.
The fabric and stitching were rough. Some seams were already coming loose, the crooked needlework puckered in places, and the cloth carried a strange, sweaty smell that wasn’t hers.
Where was she?
Who had changed her clothes?
On instinct, Bo Li pushed herself up and lifted the hem of the shirt to look at her abdomen. No wound.
She rolled up her sleeves. No needle marks on her arms either.
Before she could even breathe a little easier, a deafening bang exploded from outside—bang!
It was followed by a chorus of malicious laughter.
“This kid’s got a spine, huh? Tied to the back of a horse and dragged that long, and he didn’t make a sound…”
“Put a bullet between his legs, then we’ll see how tough he is!”
More raucous laughter.
“Can’t do that,” someone said. “If we cripple him, the manager will kill us… He’s the circus’s golden goose.”
“Golden goose? Him? He’s still wet behind the ears.”
“He’s got plenty of tricks,” the man said, chuckling. He turned his head and gave a sharp whistle, like calling a dog. “Eric, show the folks your ventriloquism. Sing for us. Do your little cons and illusions…”
Bo Li couldn’t make out what the person called “Eric” said, but the laughter outside cut off at once.
Everything went quiet; only the restless clop of hooves shifting in place remained.
Someone gave a short, cold laugh, then shouted a sharp “Hyah!” and urged his horse into a quicker pace.
No one spoke again.
But a chill sank into Bo Li’s bones—if she remembered correctly, that “Eric” was still tied behind one of those horses, being dragged along the ground.
What really made her skin crawl, though, was that the people outside were speaking English.
She lived in Los Angeles, but their accents were clearly not West Coast American. They sounded more like…French?
Had she been kidnapped by Frenchmen?
Or was it…
Bo Li squeezed her eyes shut hard and lowered her head.
The moment she clearly saw her own hands, her mind went completely blank. The back of her head tightened, and her heart began to pound like a drum.
—These weren’t her hands.
She had mild germophobia; her nails were always clean and neat, smooth and pink.
These hands were rough and red, the knuckles swollen as if from frostbite, black grime packed deep in the creases, and several brown calluses in the center of the palms.
What does a person see more than anything else each day?
Not their face, but their own hands.
Bo Li had never imagined that one day she would wake up, look down at her own body, and see someone else’s hands attached to it.
…It was like something straight out of a horror movie.
What on earth was going on?
“…Hey, Polly, Polly, look at me!”
A voice boomed in her ear like thunder.
Bo Li’s scalp tightened. She jerked her head up.
At some point, a little boy had squeezed right up in front of her. He stared at her with a pair of wide eyes.
He looked undernourished—sallow and skinny, with a crumpled flat cap on his head and a face speckled with red pockmarks.
“What are you spacing out for?” the boy said. “Something big just happened, you know? Eric stole Mike’s gold pocket watch!”
“Eric?” Bo Li rasped.
“Yeah! Mike was furious. He tied Eric’s foot to the saddle and dragged him for a few hundred meters… By the time the manager found out, his leg was already swollen like a loaf of bread, and most of the skin on his back was gone. There was meat all over the ground from where he’d been scraped off…” The boy spat in disdain. “Serves him right, always stealing our spotlight.”
Meat all over the ground from being scraped off… Just imagining it made Bo Li’s own back throb with phantom pain. The little boy, however, seemed utterly unfazed, as if he were talking not about a living person, but a rat caught in a trap.
“If you ask me, that was letting him off easy… A gold pocket watch’s worth a fortune. Mike should’ve called the cops and had him sent straight to the gallows…”
Bo Li thought, You can call the cops in this hellhole?
Wait. Gallows?
Just then, the boy squeezed closer and motioned for her to lower the tent flap, leaving only a thin slit to peek through.
“Shh, shh…” His cheeks flushed bright red as he whispered in excitement, “The manager’s here!”
Bo Li lifted her eyes and spotted Eric at a glance.
He was thin and badly injured, lying motionless on a stretcher.
The shirt on his body had been soaked black with dried blood, like a greedy shadow ready to devour him whole at any second.
The thick, metallic stench spread through the air and burrowed straight into her nose.
At first, Bo Li thought she was having a nosebleed. She instinctively tilted her head back, only realizing several seconds later that what she smelled was blood.
A flare of orange sparked: a man struck a match and lit the cigar between his lips, then walked over to Eric.
It was dusk, and the light was dim. Bo Li couldn’t make out his features clearly. She could only see a man in a suit, a watch chain hanging from his vest, and a gold gemstone ring gleaming on his thumb—he had to be the “manager” the boy had mentioned.
“My dear Mike,” the man said unhurriedly, “may I ask—why did you treat him like this?”
Only then did Bo Li notice that a blond boy was standing to one side—fat, solidly built, his face flushed and shiny with health.
The blond boy immediately shouted, “He stole my watch!”
“No, no, Mike.” The man shook his head. “You misunderstood me. What I mean is—why do you think you’re qualified to beat him into this state?”
Mike froze at once.
He clearly hadn’t expected the man to speak up for Eric and grew anxious. “Uncle—he stole the gold pocket watch Mom gave me…”
The man drew on his cigar and made a silencing gesture. “You’re my beloved nephew, so when you boys roughhouse, I usually turn a blind eye. But this time, you went too far.”
“Eric can do magic, ventriloquism, sing,” the man said, looking at Eric on the stretcher with pained regret, as if he were looking at a guard dog too weak to stand. “If I give the word, he can even crawl through a ring of fire—what about you? You do nothing but waste my food. You can’t even earn back half of what Eric brings in from one show.”
Mike’s face cycled from red to purple. “B-but he stole my gold pocket watch… Uncle! He stole my watch! It’s gold!”
The man asked, “Did you see him steal it?”
“No, but—”
“Did you find proof he stole it?”
“No, but if it wasn’t him, who would—”
The man’s voice turned ice-cold. “If he wasn’t caught, then that means he did well.”
Mike stared at him in disbelief. “Uncle, how can you…”
“How can I what?” The man gave a cold laugh. “My sister was a fine pickpocket—she could empty a lady’s bedroom without anyone noticing. And you? You didn’t even realize your own watch was gone. You nearly turned my golden goose into a cripple.”
He lowered his head and flicked a glance at Eric. “And you did it in the most thoughtless place,” he said flatly. “Now look—Eric’s leg is broken, his back is torn up. For a while, who’s going to perform magic? You?”
Mike looked as if he’d been slapped across the face again and again, cheeks burning, unable to force out a word.
After scolding him for a few lines, the man waved a hand and sent him away.
Bo Li turned their conversation over carefully and felt her skin prickle.
—Did this place even have laws?
Mike looked only sixteen or seventeen, yet the man spoke lightly of how Mike’s mother was a pickpocket.
Mike had committed something that serious—brawling, dragging someone behind a horse, nearly killing another boy—and the man had only given him a few perfunctory rebukes.
And then there were all the eerie details: the gold pocket watch, the gallows, the cigar, the match, these utterly unfamiliar hands.
…She most likely wasn’t in the modern world anymore.
Bo Li drew a deep breath, forced herself to calm down, and kept listening.
She had to hear more useful details before she could figure out where—and when—she was.
When the manager finished his cigar, he lightly kicked the stretcher under Eric’s feet. “…Can you still talk?”
No answer.
The manager didn’t mind. He continued as if speaking to himself. “I know you and Mike both want me to be fair. Too bad I’m not a judge, and I’m not the police. I don’t care who stole what. I only want money.”
“Mike’s mother paid me five thousand francs to look after this kid…” The manager gave a short laugh. “If you can earn me five thousand francs, then even if you kill Mike, I won’t say a word. Understand?”
Still no answer.
Eric lay silent and unmoving, as if dead on the stretcher.
But Bo Li went cold all over, her heart dropping hard—because the manager was clearly implying that as long as Eric made enough money, he could kill Mike.
He was encouraging two boys to kill each other.
What kind of place was this?
Or rather…what era?
Bo Li couldn’t quite catch her breath. A clammy cold sweat broke out over her skin.
The next second, an extremely hoarse teenage voice sounded: “…Understood.”
“Good boy,” the manager said approvingly. “Don’t worry—Old Mrs. Smith copied quite a few remedies from the Gypsies. She won’t let you get gangrene.”
Gypsies?
Gangrene?
Bo Li swayed with a faint dizziness.
If before it had only been suspicion, now she was a hundred percent certain she wasn’t in the modern world.
…She’d actually time-traveled.
After saying that, the manager thought for a moment, then took out a bottle and set it in front of Eric. “Whiskey. It’ll make you feel better.”
Bo Li fell silent. If she wasn’t mistaken, half of Eric’s body had already been soaked through with blood.
Injured like that—and he could still drink whiskey?
Eric, however, moved as if he’d been waiting for this. He suddenly shot an arm up and seized the bottle, so violently it made the manager jump. His fingers clenched so hard they nearly cramped. He bit the cork loose with desperate urgency and tipped his head back, draining it in one go.
The little boy beside them didn’t find anything strange about it. Instead, jealousy flashed across his face. “That’s Scotch… He stole something—why is the manager rewarding him?”
Bo Li didn’t answer.
She didn’t want to watch this grotesque scene any longer. Instead, she studied the surroundings: wagons, tents, grassland, filthy blankets, an old gas lamp, and in the corner a cloudy bucket of water.
So she really had time-traveled.
And what’s more, she hadn’t traveled within her own country, but to a…completely unfamiliar land.