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Cassius sat down at the computer and pulled up the raw footage. He had picked up plenty of visual storytelling sense from Jackie Chan and Yuen Woo-ping's teams, plus bits and pieces of VFX knowledge from working with the crew. It wasn't enough to replace a real artist, but it was more than enough to explain what he wanted.
He clicked through to a shot of Karu finishing a hand seal as the void vortex opened in front of her.
"Start here," he said, pointing at the center of the effect. "Don't just pop it in. Let it begin as a tiny point, like ink spreading on paper. Slow at first, then faster. The void should feel like it's growing, not appearing."
He kept going, describing the broken-glass edges, the deep purple base with dark red and blue swirls, and the faint, almost invisible starlight inside. The team listened and adjusted the effect in real time.
When they hit play on the new version, the room went quiet.
The vortex started small and deliberate. Its edges looked torn, like space itself was ripping. The inside swirled with chaos, and the world around it bent and twisted like heat rising off asphalt. One of the younger artists muttered, "Holy shit."
David, the lead supervisor, stared at the screen like he was seeing magic for the first time. "That's it. That's exactly what it needed."
Cassius stepped back. "Keep refining. Void isn't just destruction. It's transformation. Make people feel the rules of reality breaking."
He spent the next three days living at the VFX house, going shot by shot with the team. The mirror dimension took the most work. The original version had been too simple, just folding space like a piece of paper. Cassius pushed for something stranger—rules that flipped in some places but stayed consistent in others, so the audience could actually feel the logic bending.
The team groaned every time he gave new notes, but the results kept getting better. David finally threw his hands up one night and said, "You should be doing this job, not acting in the movie."
Cassius just smiled and kept explaining.
By the time they finished the master's sacrifice shot, everyone in the room was staring at the monitors in silence. Jackie's body turned to golden dust that rose and formed the Eye of Vishanti in the air. The symbol pulsed once, like it was breathing, then faded.
Cassius rubbed his eyes. They were close. Really close.
That night he got a text from Kevin Feige. Disney executives had seen early cuts of the effects and were already talking about spinning off more magic-based projects if the movie landed.
Cassius sent back a short reply and closed his laptop.
He spent the next couple of days in Qinghai, checking on the Shadow Project site. Tourists were showing up in bigger numbers than expected. Locals were making real money. A few kids from the area had even started drawing their own versions of Kamar-Taj after watching clips online.
One evening he was sitting in the courtyard of the guesthouse when a young couple and a mother with her son came in. The boy recognized him immediately and pulled out a notebook full of hand-drawn temples and shaky little Eye of Vishanti symbols.
Cassius took the kid inside the still-closed set and walked him through the main hall. He told him a few stories from filming and answered his questions about the hand seals. Before they left, the mother asked for a photo. Cassius said yes.
On the walk back, he checked his phone. Clips from the Ancient One trailer were already everywhere. The hashtag was climbing fast on every platform.
Marvel had dropped the final trailer that afternoon. Two minutes and seventeen seconds of pure spectacle—mirror-dimension folding, void effects that actually looked alive, Jackie's quiet power as the Master, and Kristen's chilling turn as the corrupted Karu.
The internet lost its mind.
People were posting frame-by-frame breakdowns. Others were trying to copy the hand seals on camera. Chinese fans were especially loud, pointing out the real Qinghai locations and the fact that the movie had actually brought money and attention back to the region instead of just taking from it.
Cassius scrolled through the reactions with a small smile. The numbers were strong. Buzz was strong. Everything was moving exactly the way they needed it to.
Then his phone rang.
It was Rob.
"Bro," Rob said, voice tight. "We've got a problem."