(3rd POV)
Within the first week, The Matrix box office hit $300 million.
By the second week, $740 million.
By the fourth week, $1.74 billion.
A new record. Not even The Lord of the Rings at its peak had come close to this— and the entertainment world knew it. People knew it. The number sat in newspapers and on television broadcasts and on HellBook forums like something nobody had quite figured out how to process yet. One month. One film. $1.74 billion.
Even for Hellfire, nobody had imagined this was possible.
But then, the film had earned it. A top critic had put it plainly in his column:
"This is a story unlike anything that has come before it. A film that does not simply entertain— it challenges reality itself. Are we truly real? Are we living in the real world? Is this all a simulation? The film raises these questions and then refuses to let you put them down when you leave the theatre. 1277 is without a doubt a year to remember."
Most viewers felt the same. The film had unsettled them, made them question things they had never thought to question— and they loved it for that. The discomfort was the point. The discomfort was the whole experience.
It had also, within the span of a single month, produced a cult.
In a private room on the upper floor of a hotel in Angel City, nine people sat in a circle around a carefully drawn magical diagram. All of them wore black suits. The curtains were drawn. A single lantern burned in the corner.
At the head of the group sat Quen— an elf of 178 years who wore the face of a man in his forties, with sharp eyes that had spent decades staring at things most people couldn't see.
"I have studied dimensional magic for fifty years," he said, his voice measured and calm. "I have spent those years communicating with beings from outside our world, pushing against the boundaries of what magic can reach. And in all that time, I hit a wall. Lack of knowledge. Lack of a framework." He paused. "Then I watched The Matrix."
The group leaned in.
"The film gave me something I had been missing— a way of thinking about the structure of reality itself. If this world is a layer, then dimensional magic is not about reaching outward. It is about reaching through. And if you accept, logically, that nothing in this world is the true foundation—" he spread his hands— "then the rules that govern this world are not absolute. They are imposed. And what is imposed can be broken."
The room erupted.
"Does that mean we can wake up in our real bodies?"
"Can we become like Neo? Invincible? Bending the rules of physics?"
"What if Agents come after us?"
Quen smiled. "I cannot answer those questions. I do not know what waits on the other side, or whether any of what you are hoping for is possible. What I know is that we have spent three weeks building something worth testing." He gestured at the magic circle drawn across the floor— dense, intricate, weeks of collaborative work between himself and three circle-craft specialists in the group. At its center sat a cluster of magic cores, expensive ones, the kind that powered Forbidden-class rituals. "We have called it the Matrix Circle. Tonight, we find out what it does."
Nobody spoke. The excitement in the room had gone quiet and solid, the way it does just before something happens.
"Pour your mana into the cores," Quen said. "Together."
They placed their hands and pushed.
The cores ignited. A low hum filled the room, and then wind— impossible wind, in an enclosed space with no windows open— swept through and sent papers scattering. The circle blazed with light so sudden and complete that every eye in the room shut against it involuntarily.
It held for two full minutes.
Then the light dropped.
They opened their eyes.
Someone was standing in the center of the circle.
A humanoid figure. Robed. A wide-brimmed hat tilted slightly on their head. A wand held loosely at their side.
Nobody moved.
As their eyes adjusted, the details came into focus— a young woman, unmistakably an elf, with pointed ears, ocean-blue eyes, and hair to match. She looked around the room with an expression of pure bewilderment.
"...Is that an elf?"
"How did she get in here? This room was sealed."
"She came out of the circle. She came out of the circle."
Quen grabbed his own head with both hands. "A Summoning Circle— it converted into a Summoning Circle—"
"That's impossible—!"
"We didn't summon anyone! We weren't trying to summon anyone!"
The room dissolved into confused shouting. Nobody had intended this. The entire point had been to pierce reality, not drag someone through it.
The young woman looked at all of them. Then she spoke.
Everyone fell quiet.
None of them understood a single word.
"What— what language is that?"
Quen stared at her, his fifty years of dimensional research suddenly feeling very inadequate. "I... have no idea."
The young elf tilted her head, glancing around the room with calm, unhurried curiosity. For someone who had just been yanked through a magic circle into an unknown location, she seemed remarkably unbothered by it. If anything, she looked mildly entertained.
She closed her eyes briefly. Her senses stretched outward— quietly absorbing the language flowing between Quen and the others as they scrambled around her in confusion. When she opened her eyes again, she spoke.
"My name is Saza. I am an elf, and I am two thousand years old." She glanced around the room. "Is there a reason I was summoned here? This is a completely different world, isn't it."
It wasn't really a question.
The room went dead silent.
Then everyone started talking at once.
"T-two thousand— that's not possible!"
"There is absolutely no way you are two thousand years old!"
"That's older than my great-great-great grandfather! He barely made it past four hundred!"
"You are older than the current calendar!"
"You have to be lying. You look like you're barely an adult!"
Saza blinked at them. Then she used her senses again— this time directing them at each person in the room one by one, quietly reading their ages.
She stopped when she reached Quen.
Her expression shifted. The amusement drained out of it. She stared at the old-looking elf with something close to alarm.
"...You." She pointed at him slowly. "How old are you?"
"One hundred and seventy-eight— what does that have to do with—"
"One hundred and seventy-eight." Her voice had gone very flat. "And you look like that."
Quen straightened. "I beg your—"
"In my world, an elf your age would have the appearance of a human child of three years." She looked across the rest of the group, her brow furrowing deeper with each face. "All of you. You are all so young in years and yet your bodies look so..." She trailed off, genuinely unsettled. "What is happening to elves in this world? Why are you aging like this?"
Nobody had an answer for that.
---
Arthur had no idea that The Matrix had made enough of an impression on the world's magic researchers that they'd accidentally pulled a two-thousand-year-old elf out of another dimension entirely.
He had other things on his mind.
For the first time, he stepped into the Matrix world through the «Creator's Realm»— and he had chosen deliberately. Not the film version he had modified for Hellfire, with its adjusted world-building and four races. The original. The real source material.
Upon entering, the first thing he registered was that he had landed inside the simulation itself— not the real world beneath it, the one hollowed out and overrun by machines.
Just the constructed layer. The lie that humanity lived inside without knowing.
It looked like his previous life. Circa the 90s. The skyline, the streets, the dull grey weight of it all.
He materialized on the roof of a skyscraper and stood there a moment.
His Divine Sense stretched outward across the city. It didn't take long to find Neo— a few buildings over, completely ordinary, not yet anything. Just a man living inside a lie he hadn't been handed the tools to question.
Then Arthur looked deeper. Past the surface of the world, past the streets and the people and the hum of it all running underneath. Past everything visible.
Green. Zeroes and ones, layered behind the world's structure like bones beneath skin.
He exhaled.
"This is a relief. My Divine Sense actually has enough capability to see through this and know it isn't real— which means the world I am living in is in fact the real world, and not a simulation. If it were fake, I would have seen the same thing here."
Although he hadn't shown it, he had been quite worried that the world he reincarnated in was a fake one.
Seeing the Matrix from the inside, feeling the unmistakable difference between this and his world, put that to rest cleanly. The relief was genuine.
He turned his attention to the structure itself and began studying it properly.
"Analyzing this world's structure is interesting. It was programmed in a way that everything should work exactly as it is intended— like a real one. Seamless on the surface. However, there are constraints built into the body itself that the real world doesn't have." He stroked his chin. "I could theoretically copy this structure and use it to create a fake reality— place a target inside it and have them experience it as real. Far better than illusion magic. This could be genuinely useful for filmmaking.'"
He paused.
"But copying the structure is easier said than done. The sheer volume of code running underneath all of this— countless layers, each one dependent on the next. Even as a god, I cannot simply replicate something of this complexity. It is not a matter of understanding it. I understand it. Reproducing it from scratch is an entirely different problem."
He considered it a moment longer, then set the thought aside.
The laws of the Matrix had interesting ideas about space and time— and since they were built into the code itself, he could theoretically brute-force his way through the program and navigate its history personally.
See past events within this world firsthand. But that was only possible because the code existed to move through. Outside this simulation, in the real world, there was no underlying program to force through. No code beneath reality to navigate. The same trick would mean nothing out there.
He held out a palm and produced a fireball— more out of curiosity than anything else.
The flame appeared. Then flickered. Then glitched— stuttering violently in his hand, the magic visibly at war with the simulation's logic. He could see the binary screaming around it. 01010, repeating, rejecting, breaking apart. The magic had exceeded the laws this world was built around entirely— exceeded even the logic of the real world as this simulation understood it.
"Interesting. So magic breaks it from the inside rather than bending it."
He let the flame dissolve.
"I wonder where the Architect is in this world."
He turned his Divine Sense toward the deeper layer of the Matrix itself— past the surface simulation, past the code running behind everything, into the core of the system where the architecture was maintained.
And there he was.
The Architect. Sitting deep within the system, insulated from the simulation running around him.
Arthur looked at the location. Then, without much effort, he stepped through the structure of the simulation— threading between the glitches, moving through the gaps in the code— and materialized directly behind him.
The Architect was already panicking, eyes darting across his screens, watching the glitch ripple through the system.
"What is happening?! Why is there a glitch within the system?! What is going on?!"
Arthur studied him with calm, unhurried interest.
"Hello," he said.