(3rd POV)
Two days passed. In that time, Arthur collected tens of millions of ghosts, containing them within a false domain of infinite space — a pocket reality designed to hold beings without physical form. Once they were gathered, he explained himself plainly: what he wanted, what it would mean, and what they could expect.
The reaction was immediate chaos.
At first, pure terror. One moment the ghosts had been drifting through whatever quiet limbo they'd settled into; the next, a great deity had pulled them in like smoke through a vent. But the moment they understood what was actually being proposed — an artificial life, a simulated world, the Matrix made real — the fear curdled into something else entirely.
"So that movie I watched was actually possible?!"
"Incredible. I haven't felt my body in so long. Is it really possible to experience life again?" A pause, then a quieter, more confused voice: "Though I can't explain why I want it so badly. I don't even remember my previous life."
"I'm going to fade out of existence eventually anyway. Might as well."
The chatter spread in every direction, overlapping and endless, the way it only could among millions.
But plenty refused. Arthur released every one of them without ceremony or argument. No pressure, no negotiation. Just an open door.
He stood above it all on the platform, watching the scene unfold — the sorting of the willing from the unwilling, the weight of that quiet authority.
'Feels like being a judge,' he thought, and shook his head at himself.
He stepped out of the domain and emerged in his office.
Firfel was already there.
He hadn't sensed her coming, which still caught him off-guard sometimes. She was a deity now — had been since he shared half his power with her — and while she sat just below him in raw strength, the gap narrowed a little more each day.
Her appearance had been shifting too, gradually, the way all deities eventually did; something in her features had grown more refined, more luminous, more unmistakably divine.
She looked at him with those beautiful, sharp eyes and got straight to it.
"Arthur." Her brow lifted. "Don't think I don't know what you've been doing for two days. You've been collecting ghosts?"
He raised both hands. "Relax. Nothing evil."
"I know." She laughed softly, no trace of suspicion in it. That easy trust had always been one of her qualities. "I'm just curious what you're actually doing with them. Why ghosts?"
She tilted her head. "It's not exactly a subtle operation, you know. Anyone powerful enough to be paying attention has probably already noticed. You've been pulling significant numbers from across the whole world."
"Are you building a ghost crew? Like the one Hellfire uses for productions?"
The Hellfire Ghost Crew was no secret — they'd been part of film productions long enough that the public had simply accepted them as part of the operation.
Arthur gave her a light pat on the shoulder. "Good guess. But no." He settled back. "I'm running a Matrix Project. I figured out how to build an actual Matrix simulation using the S-C — a real one, not a concept piece. But it needs ghosts to function. Their consciousness generates perspective. That perspective becomes reality inside the simulation."
He walked her through the rest of it.
Firfel's eyes widened slightly as the picture came together. "You actually want to recreate the Matrix — your film's simulated world — using ghosts as the hosts? Their minds running the whole thing?"
"Exactly."
She studied him for a moment, expression shifting into something more measured. "So you're forcing ghosts to serve your project against their will?"
"What? No." He shook his head firmly. "I asked every single one of them. The ones who wanted in, stayed. The ones who didn't, I let go. That's it."
The tension in her face eased. "Good." Then, curiosity resettling: "But why build a Matrix at all? Is it another step in film technology development?"
It was a fair question. She'd watched him reshape the industry from the ground up — VFX studios, computers, techniques that hadn't existed five years ago. The things considered impossible then were standard now. And he was still accelerating.
Now this.
"Partly," Arthur said. "But the primary reason is that the Matrix will serve as my second Divine Kingdom."
That surprised her. "Why do you need another one? You already have a Divine Kingdom."
He'd brought her there before. She remembered it clearly — a vast, impossibly advanced city unlike anything she'd seen in any world, enormous and luminous, with a distinctive red tower rising at its center, reminiscent of the one in Moonlight Kingdom.
"That one is my main kingdom," Arthur said. "My domain as the Lord of Entertainment — it belongs to that authority specifically." He paused. "But I also hold the authority of Invention now. And as Lord of Invention, my followers aren't confined to this world. They exist across multiple worlds. That domain needs its own separate realm — something much larger, completely independent from my primary Divine Kingdom in the Divine World."
He let that land before continuing.
"There are already souls waiting. Followers of the God of Invention who died in their respective worlds, ready to enter a Divine Kingdom and live again as citizens. But there's no realm for them yet. So they're just... waiting. Still ghosts, wherever they fell."
"I see." Firfel nodded slowly. "You need the Matrix to serve as the Lord of Invention's realm." She turned the logic over for a moment, then frowned slightly. "But isn't it still just a fabricated reality — completely separate from the Divine World? Can it genuinely qualify as a Divine Kingdom?"
Arthur considered that for a beat. "Of course it can. Who cares whether it's physically part of the Divine World? I'm a deity. Whatever I declare official, is official."
Firfel laughed at that — the casual, unshakeable certainty of it.
"That said," he continued, "I'm still short on ghosts. What I have now isn't close to enough. My actual goal is a Matrix that spans a galaxy, not just one planet. For that, I need far more than I've collected."
Firfel stared at him. "If you're building something that large... aren't you just constructing an entire reality?"
"You could put it that way." He didn't seem troubled by that framing at all. "And honestly, if it's real to the consciousness of the ghosts living inside it, who's to say it isn't a real reality? The distinction stops mattering at a certain scale." He paused, then added: "And unlike the machines in the film, I'm not using these souls as a power source. I'll be the one sustaining them — nurturing them. All they're providing is 'perspective'. Their consciousness generates the reality itself. That's all I need from them."
Perspective.
It was the axis everything turned on. Even Arthur, with all the divine authority he held, couldn't fabricate a reality from nothing. Consciousness was the ingredient that made it true.
"Alright." Firfel accepted that with a small nod. "I'll be waiting to see this second Divine Kingdom when it's finished." She stepped forward, kissed him quickly, and vanished.
Arthur stood there for a second. "This girl..." He shook his head, something between fond and exasperated. Ever since she'd started gaining full command of her divine power, she'd developed a habit of simply disappearing whenever the mood struck her — no warning, no transition, just gone.
He let it go and teleported to the S-C room.
The Matrix installation was close to complete. He could feel it — the framework nearly settled, the architecture almost stable.
What it still lacked was population. Perspective required minds, and he needed more of them.
He extended his senses outward and began sweeping the world, searching the places ghosts tended to hide: old structures, forgotten spaces, the quiet edges of inhabited areas. The ones he'd already collected and released — the ones who'd declined — he passed over without a second thought. Their choice had been made.
Then something stopped him.
A peculiar signal, faint but distinct, coming from the private residence of Joseph Jackson — one of Hellfire Agency's biggest stars.
Arthur turned his attention toward it and felt it clearly: supernatural energy, concentrated and unusual. Not the faint, shapeless drift of an ordinary ghost. Something higher than that.
He used clairvoyance to look closer.
Joseph was standing in front of a mirror. His reflection looked back — technically his face, technically his features — but the alignment was off in a way that had nothing to do with glass or light. The reflection wasn't quite following him. And Joseph was talking to it, casual and comfortable, the way a person talks to someone they've known for a long time.
'Oh.' Arthur's interest sharpened. 'That's a ghost. But not a common one — the energy signature is several tiers above what I've been collecting. And that mirror...'
He examined it more carefully. The mirror wasn't a mirror. Not entirely. It was a channel — a physical object bridging two states of existence, connecting the material world to something beyond it. A spiritual layer. A realm that occupied the same space as the physical world but existed completely outside it.
The thought hit him a moment later, and when it did, it was obvious.
If ghosts existed in the physical world, they had to exist in the spiritual one too. And not in small numbers. The spiritual realm — the unseen layer — should be saturated with them.
He'd swept the spiritual realm before. He remembered it clearly: strange creatures, deformed beasts, entities that had drifted far from anything recognizably human. But no ghosts. None he could find, at least. They hadn't appeared where he'd looked.
But Joseph's mirror was pointing somewhere else. A deeper layer, or a different pocket — somewhere the ghosts were actually gathered, hidden from the surface of the spiritual world in a way that had kept them invisible to his previous searches.
That mirror was the door.