This story is a treat. The alternating story threads give me the same feeling as reading some of the earlier Wheel of Time books, where each time I reach a viewpoint-change I wish the camera could stay where it is just a little longer.

Sometimes, I've found that the reveal that English is the author's second language can presage a rough reading experience, but if this work is anything to go by, the third language is the charm! Prose is solid, and typos or grammatical errors are rarer here than they are in many competing works by authors who speak English as a first language.

On top of all of that, this is a genuinely interesting isekai premise, setting up space to examine or outright subvert a lot of the standard-issue genre conventions.

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