And just like that—at exactly 3:17 a.m., with the air heavy and sticky like wet gauze wrapped around his chest, Adrian Rivera sat up in the dim half-light of the Manila condo, his shirt clinging to him with a film of sweat and city grime, heart hammering as if something unseen had yanked him out of a dream, and as he blinked through the humid dark, the stillness around him fractured not with sound from outside—no dog fights, no karaoke, no tricycle engines—but from within, as if the echo of a *ding* had originated deep inside his skull, followed by the soft pulse of a strange blue light dancing across the ceiling like the world itself was glitching, until, as naturally as breath, a shimmering interface unfolded in midair in front of him—clean lines, no frames, just a floating projection of soft text and pulsing data like something straight out of a sci-fi movie he never auditioned for—and he stared, wide-eyed, as it calmly declared in elegant sans serif:
**\[WELCOME, DIRECTOR.]**
**\[System Initialization Complete.]**
**\[You have received: NOOB PACK.]**
—and before he could even form a coherent thought, a pixelated film reel appeared above his bed, spinning slowly in the air like a loot drop from a video game, wrapped in glittering light and expectation, and although every fiber of logic in his body screamed that this had to be sleep deprivation or a psychotic break, some part of him—a part that remembered empty audition rooms and rejected screenplays and the feeling of directing student films in LA alleyways with lights borrowed from a cousin—reached out to touch the reel, which dissolved the moment his fingers brushed it and slammed into his chest like a bomb of light and memory, burning through him with the force of a thousand lives, and suddenly he wasn't Adrian anymore, not exactly, because he *was* standing behind a camera on a chaotic film set where smoke machines coughed and actors cried and every crew member looked at him like he held the world in his palm, and then he *was* on a panel in Venice discussing frame composition with subtitles under his words, and then he *was* alone in a dark edit bay watching a raw take of a monologue that somehow reached through the screen and cracked his heart, and then he *was* in thirty places at once, holding scripts, screaming over budget cuts, writing rewrites in cabs, and smiling like a god as people called him *maestro*, until he slammed back into his Manila body with the taste of film dust in his mouth and every nerve in his skin screaming, collapsed to the floor, sweat-soaked and shaking as if he'd lived twenty years in thirty seconds, just as the interface coolly returned with a new update:
**\[Director Experience Installed.]**
**\[Genre Affinity: Drama / Psychological / Meta-cinema]**
**\[Status Window Unlocked.]**
—and as he coughed and gasped, he watched as another screen unfurled, this one shaped like a stat sheet from a roleplaying game, cold and brutally honest as it measured him with digital indifference:
---
**\[STATUS – ADRIAN RIVERA]**
**Level:** 1
**Role:** Director (Amateur Tier)
**STATS:**
* Fitness: 70 / 100
* Charisma: 55 / 100
* Creativity: 60 / 100
* Perception: 58 / 100
* Leadership: 50 / 100
* Luck: 42 / 100
* Acting: 80 / 100
* Directing Experience: 100 / 100 *(Previous Life)*
* Financial Stability: 4 / 100
---
—and despite everything, despite the pain and madness and blinking lights and the fact that he was now officially living inside a user interface like some indie film version of *The Matrix*, Adrian still groaned, "Forty-two luck?" and then laughed, sharp and low and disbelieving, just as a new screen faded in like the world was waiting for him to press record:
**\[Main Quest Unlocked: MAKE YOUR FIRST SHORT MOVIE]**
**Objective:** Conceptualize, shoot, edit, and upload an original short film (3–15 minutes) to a public social media platform with the goal of attracting authentic attention.
**REWARD IF SUCCESSFUL:**
→ +5 to All Attributes
→ Experience the Life and Knowledge of a Legendary Director
→ ₱10,000,000 System Grant
**\[Optional Side Quest: Convince Joms to Act in Your Short Film]**
→ Reward: Relationship Buff (Joms), "Behind-the-Scenes Chaos Tolerance" Passive Skill
—and with that, silence returned, the glowing interface slowly fading into nothing, and Adrian sat cross-legged on the worn-out floor, head spinning, mind racing, heart trying to reconcile the absurdity of a floating mission briefing with the very real sense that something had just shifted—not just within him, but around him, like the city outside had changed roles and was now playing *Set* instead of *Noise*, and for a long moment he simply sat there, listening to the faint rattle of the electric fan and the distant hum of Manila still alive beyond the walls, before he stood up slowly, each movement sore and slow and grounded, and crossed the room to his duffel bag, where inside the folds of tangled clothes and frayed notebooks sat his battered Canon DSLR camera, still smelling faintly of gaffer tape and overworked dreams, the same one he used to shoot scenes for people who paid him in coffee and LinkedIn endorsements, and
when he turned it on and saw the green LED blink weakly at 12%, something in his chest clicked—not panic, not confusion, but focus, the same feeling he used to get on a good day on set, when a shot just *worked* and he didn't even know why, and he looked up at the window, at the glow of Manila under the layer of smog and neon, and saw not chaos but *potential*, not noise but *texture*, and he whispered, "Let's roll," without thinking, because the truth was, for the first time in either of his lives, he wasn't waiting for permission from anyone—no producer, no gatekeeper, no green light from some executive who'd never been on set past midnight—and as the camera whirred and he jotted down ideas in a torn notebook with a busted pen, titles like *Detour* and *Rehearsal* and *The Life I Didn't Ask For* spilling out in half-formed sentences, he felt the seed of something taking root—not just a short film, not just a quest, but a declaration, a reintroduction, an opening shot to a story he refused to let someone else direct, and outside, in the distance, a jeepney backfired like a cue point and somewhere upstairs someone yelled "Cut the damn karaoke!" and the system, ever patient, returned one last time with a quiet message blinking like a heartbeat:
**\[Scene 1: Begin.]**(End Chapter)