Chapter 184: Book 3: A New Era
I am, in all honesty, quite surprised when nothing actually goes wrong. I was half-expecting to wake up in a new loop, all activities in the last one erased from some terrible event in my sleep. Or an inconveniently timed heart attack. Maybe both.
But no. I wake up in bed—I don't even remember getting out from the tub and into a bed, and certainly not getting into dry clothes—refreshed and ready to go, and nothing goes wrong.
Not even during the surgery. It goes exactly as planned with only minor variations; Guard and Ahkelios, for instance, are watching a lot more closely this time around. Mari sits nearby, feet nervously tapping against the dirt. It's early enough in the day that the village is remarkably silent.
Besides those things, everything is identical to what I experienced when I used The Road Not Taken, down to Naru's reactions to being woken from his sleep.
"Why did—Thank you?" Naru looks around. "What..."
"You're back home," I say. Tarin's already sitting up, but he watches Naru quietly, not saying a word. Naru freezes when he finally realizes where he is and who's around him. There's an instant where he almost reacts impulsively—I can see the way his entire body tenses and the way he begins to curse—but he chokes it back down, making a strangled noise in this throat.
"Tell me what happened," he finally says. "Please."
He says the word like he isn't quite used to it.
"He not shout?" Tarin sounds impressed. "You change."