Parisian Dessert Tycoon in the 19th Century (Business Management)

Emily woke up one morning to discover she had transmigrated into the body of a girl with the same name in nineteenth-century Paris.

At the time, the banks of the Seine sparkled with lights, opera houses and department stores were on the rise, and the romantic spirit of France was everywhere.

Yet Emily and her family lived in a damp, run-down house on Rue Saint-Denis. They rented a little bakery and scraped by, rising before dawn to knead dough, let it rise, and bake bread, then delivering the finished goods to the bakery run by her aunt's family to sell.

The two families had worked together for years, until Emily's parents were falsely accused of arson and taken away by the gendarmes to prison.

"Emily, your family's reputation is in tatters now. We can't let the shop get dragged into this too." Her aunt clutched a handkerchief, her voice full of sympathy, though calculation was plain in her eyes. "We have no choice but to end our partnership early. I'm sure you understand our predicament."

As it turned out, her aunt had already secretly signed a contract with a much larger bakery.

Looking at the little bakery on the verge of bankruptcy, Emily, who in her previous life had spent years studying desserts in France and earned the title of French MOF pastry chef, wrote down the three things she needed to do most:

First, make her aunt's family cough up the penalty for breaking the contract.

Second, get her parents out of prison.

Third, Make the little bakery great again!!

In those days, ordinary families had little access to sweets beyond rice pudding made from leftover rice, milk, and cheap sugar, or coarse flour cakes dusted with sugar. Refined desserts were reserved for aristocratic salons, and most commoners could hardly hope to see one, let alone taste one.

Then one day, an inconspicuous dessert shop quietly opened on a street corner in Paris.

Caneles, eclairs, colorful macarons, and mille-feuille: the French classics were a given. What truly made Parisians' eyes widen were the novel treats they had never seen before: molten cheesecake that melted in the mouth, Sicilian cannoli filled with sweet cream, Viennese Sachertorte drizzled with rich chocolate sauce, Portuguese egg tarts that spilled piping-hot filling when bitten into, lotus pastries that looked like real flowers blooming on the plate, and Turkish baklava wrapped in layer upon layer of thin pastry and crushed pistachios...

A line formed outside the shop every day. New treats often sold out in less than half a day, and even society ladies hired people to queue for them, just to get a box of limited-edition desserts. Before long, branches bearing the same sign began opening one after another across Paris.

From a destitute girl trapped in a narrow old house on a backstreet to a pastry magnate who shook Europe's upper crust, Emily's legendary life was only just beginning.

Theme: Make great desserts, and keep striving every day.