Chapter 1: Reborn Again—Do I Really Have to Stick to the Same Old Line of Work?
April 1989.
Los Angeles.
The afternoon sun filtered through the dusty windows of a bargain-basement Hollywood soundstage, filling the air with the stale scent of aged lumber mixed with expired film stock.
Inside this cramped space—barely five hundred square meters—William Blake pressed his fingers hard against his temples, as if trying to force a soul that did not belong to this era back into his skull.
On the desk before him lay a freshly delivered asset statement from an accounting firm. The numbers on it were painfully conspicuous.
William Blake—a down-and-out third-rate director from the future—was also this era's newest "tenant."
Perhaps it was obsession carried over from his previous life. Before his memories awakened, this version of William had plunged into Hollywood's mire like a compulsive gambler.
His origins left him almost no room to retreat.
His father had been reduced to ashes on a distant battlefield, giving his life for a nation that called itself the beacon of humanity—America.
And yet, neither he nor his mother had received a single cent in compensation.
Where did the money go?
Only God knew.
After William came of age, his mother burned through the last flicker of her life and passed away, leaving him utterly alone.
No family backing.
No elite education.
No safety net.
William's starting point had been nothing more than a sweaty, foul-smelling production grunt—summoned and dismissed at will on set.
Once, he had dreamed obsessively of sitting in that folding chair engraved with the word Director, commanding the fate of an entire crew like a god.
Ironically, that dream had come true.
Just not in the way anyone would expect.
Thanks to an inheritance from some distant relative that seemed to fall from the sky, William still had one million dollars left after paying the damned inheritance tax.
In 1989, that was a staggering sum.
The problem was that the pre-awakening William possessed nothing but blind passion for film. His head was full of mush, and his professional competence hovered near zero.
With money in hand, he hastily registered a small production company—then made a decision so catastrophic that the current William wanted to slam his head into a wall.
He spent nearly all the remaining cash on top-tier hardware.
Staring at the rows of Panavision cameras gleaming with cold metallic light, complete ARRI lighting rigs, and high-end recording equipment stacked in the warehouse, William felt an overwhelming urge to slap himself senseless.
Even the Big Eight studios in Hollywood routinely rented equipment to spread costs.
And this tiny workshop—one that didn't even have a complete script yet—had dared to build its own "equipment vault"?
This wasn't filmmaking.
This was charity—generosity of the most idiotic kind.
He had cheerfully converted a million dollars into cold, precision-engineered machines, yet failed to leave himself even a drop of oil to make them run.
If William had any wish at that moment, it was to time-travel back to the instant he inherited that million dollars.
Not spiritually—physically.
So he could beat the ever-living hell out of his pre-awakening self.
Not knowing something was fine.
But couldn't he at least have learned?
How had reincarnation made him this stupid?
It was infuriating beyond measure.
Now, his bank account held a little over twenty thousand dollars.
In Hollywood, that was barely enough to cover a few days' worth of boxed lunches and insurance for a crew.
Making a movie?
Pure fantasy.
William's temples throbbed as if struck by a hammer. He rubbed his forehead irritably, his gaze slowly sharpening—confusion giving way to resolve.
In his previous life, William had indeed spent his entire existence in this industry.
It was just that the part he had mastered lay on the dark side of Hollywood.
Adult Valley Pictures
(What exactly Adult Valley Pictures was is something best left unsaid—spelling it out would make the story impossible to publish.)
In the era William had lived in, the tidal wave of streaming media had long since drowned the afterglow of the film age.
Whether it was so-called serious cinema or Adult Valley's "specialty productions," everything had ultimately been reduced to fast-food sensory stimulation.
For reasons he could neither clearly explain nor comfortably admit—reasons that even embarrassed him—William had spent his previous life directing films for those Adult Valley companies scattered across California.
Day after day, he faced nothing but mechanical, beautyless movements and cheap, disposable sets.
Yet the part of him that longed to make real films had never been worn away by the constant flood of hormones.
That was his final private sanctuary.
Whenever a shoot wrapped, in the corners of sets reeking of sweat and perfume, he would pore over master-level storyboards and editing breakdowns from classic cinema.
Decades of immersion had etched those techniques deep into his bones. Even as a third-rate director, William had absorbed the camera language refined through generations of post-streaming evolution—tight pacing, aggressive movement, visual efficiency.
At the crossroads of 1989, William possessed absolute confidence:
His understanding of visual storytelling alone was enough to unleash a dimensionality-breaking blow against the current film industry.
Reality, however, answered him with a resounding slap.
Even the cleverest cook can't make a meal without rice.
Top-tier cameras could indeed capture dazzling imagery—but they couldn't spit out cash, nor conjure film stock and actors out of thin air.
The measly twenty thousand dollars in his account didn't even qualify as a ripple in the money-devouring black hole known as the film industry.
"Damn it!"
William exploded at the empty, deathly silent office.
"Fuck!"
"Looks like I'll have to go back to my old trade."
He drew in a deep breath, as if trying to turn the moldy air itself into momentum for a breakthrough.
Then he shoved open the half-closed wooden office door and strode out.
"Hey, Little boss—why the long face? That doesn't look like the William Blake who's always bragging about crushing Hollywood under his heel."
The voice had barely faded when an arresting figure entered William's field of vision.
Standing before him was Nicole Kidman.
A future Academy Award winner.
A cold, luminous goddess worshipped by generations of American youth.
But in the spring of 1989, she was still just a shooting star cutting through Hollywood's night sky.
The psychological thriller Dead Calm, starring her, had only recently been released.
While large-scale box office data was still fermenting, industry insiders had already given glowing reviews to this Australian girl with porcelain skin and explosive on-screen presence.
Audition offers were flying across the Pacific like snowflakes, piling up on her desk.
Their meeting was no cheap, romantic coincidence.
The soundstage William rented sat within a bustling production plaza, surrounded by studios large and small, along with practical filming sets.
On ordinary days, it was a gladiatorial arena where actors, directors, and producers traded business cards—and gossip.
In truth, it was Nicole who had knocked on William's door first.
Nicole Kidman, at that time, was far more ambitious—and far more clear-headed—than outsiders realized.
She firmly believed that in Hollywood's pyramid, every additional producer's phone number was another insurance policy against obscurity.
Though William was still unknown, his extravagant purchase of top-tier equipment had drawn plenty of sideways glances.
Behind closed doors, people whispered:
Either this young man was a reckless heir burning through family money—
or a deeply concealed rising director, waiting for his moment.