You Can't Just Pick Any Poster as a Prop

A faint smile tugged at the corner of Shinji's mouth.

"I... I understand."

Though she was deeply unwilling, Artoria still surrendered to Shinji's tyranny for the sake of snacks.

"Saber, you'll have to work extra hard~ For more delicious food."

Shinji smiled as he patted Artoria on the head, putting the devilish side he'd learned from his adorable little sister on full display.

"Hmph, you despicable Master. Threatening me like this..."

Artoria unhappily slapped Shinji's hand away, then went over to the lounge, tore open a bag of snacks, and began eating them in a sulk.

"Just as I thought. Being a glutton really is an ingrained part of Artoria's character." Shinji chuckled.

Smack.

Suddenly, Lancer Cú Chulainn planted a heavy hand on Shinji's shoulder and gave him a teasing look. The meaning was obvious:

Haha, Master, you're bullying a girl.

"You're laughing too!" Shinji, already fuming, kicked Cú Chulainn in the butt. "I told you to hold back when you fought Shirou, and you still popped a light bulb! Keep this up, and I'll dock your pay!"

"Got it, Master."

Seeing Cú Chulainn's cheeky grin, Shinji couldn't tell whether the free-spirited guy had taken his words to heart.

These Heroic Spirits were first-rate at fight scenes, and their movements were a pleasure to watch. More than once, Shinji had thought that summoning Heroic Spirits to make movies was the best decision he'd ever made.

"It's just that a lot of them aren't very good at the basics of acting."

Shinji sighed helplessly.

Since filming had begun, these guys had caused trouble more than once or twice.

"Hopefully, they'll improve after this."

Shinji waved Artoria and Cú Chulainn off to get ready to shoot again, then went to recheck the warehouse set himself.

The details made or broke a production. This was Shinji's first movie, and it would very likely reach audiences around the world, so he had to make sure everything was as perfect as possible.

"What a handful. Heroic Spirits really are all problem children."

Master Shinji tapped his shoulder with his director's megaphone, his face full of helplessness.

"Haha, Shinji, being a director really is hard work for you."

Shirou walked over, wearing an identical replacement costume.

"Shirou, don't stand there enjoying yourself. I won't go easy on you during the next take just because you feel sorry for me."

"Haha~ You're strict."

Shirou shrugged as he looked at his childhood friend.

"Well, I always knew it would be hard work. If I couldn't stick with something like this, I wouldn't have chosen to make movies in the first place."

Watching the busy set, Shinji tapped the director's megaphone in his hand again and again.

"Are you confident?"

"Of course. This is the beginning of a grand project that will change the lives of us magi."

Shirou glanced at Shinji and said, with a hint of envy, "You're always so confident, Shinji. Sometimes, I really wonder where you get all that confidence."

"Maybe... because I'm a genius."

Shinji gave a mysterious smile and walked over to the camera dolly behind the director's camera.

"Let's do that shot again. Everyone, get back into position!"

Shinji made his routine call over the megaphone.

"Props?"

"OK!"

"Set?"

"OK!"

"Lighting?"

"OK!"

"Everyone, get ready..."

Shinji took a red baseball cap from Sakura and put it on backward. "Fate/stay night, scene four, take thirty-five... Action!"

Smack.

As the clapperboard snapped shut, the most iconic scene in the Nasuverse played out once more before Shinji's camera.

The pure moonlight, the saintly knight girl, and the line etched into the DNA of every Nasuverse fan.

"Servant, Saber. I have answered your summons."

"Are you my Master?"

### You Can't Just Pick Any Poster for a Prop

Matou Shinji was a self-proclaimed veteran otaku who had transmigrated into another world.

Before transmigrating, Master Shinji had been into the things that most ACG fans liked, such as novels, games, and anime. He'd also known a thing or two about related fields like Hollywood movies and tokusatsu shows.

Like most transmigrators, Master Shinji had died in an accident. For some unknown reason, he'd then inexplicably transmigrated into the body of a seven-year-old blue-haired boy in 1994.

Transmigration should have been a good thing for an otaku like Shinji. But when his cheap old man called him by name, told him he had a little sister named "Sakura," and said they were going back to their hometown in Fuyuki City, Japan, Shinji felt that the world was doomed.

Matou Shinji was a character in the famous anime Fate/stay night, and the most useless Master in the Fifth Holy Grail War.

Moreover, in every route of FSN, Shinji's ending was less than ideal. At best, he could be said to get off lightly in the UBW route; in the other two routes, he died more miserably than in the last.

As for fighting against fate... Thinking of the old monster in the Matou Family, Shinji figured it would be hard. Very, very, very hard.

So, during his first few days after transmigrating, Shinji had been consumed by anxiety, afraid that some ET Old Worm would toy with him until he died.

Fortunately, things didn't stay that way for long.

Only after Shinji had truly arrived at the Matou Family and gotten a closer look did he realize how different reality was from what he'd imagined. The gap was as obvious as the difference in bust size between King Blanket and Lancer Artoria.

The world Shinji had transmigrated into was indeed the Nasuverse, and it had all the familiar elements he knew, such as magecraft and the Holy Grail War.

But this world was very different from the Nasuverse he remembered. Its mysteries were on the verge of drying up.

For some unknown reason, magecraft had declined rapidly after the world entered the modern era, to the point that it was barely holding on.

Take the Holy Grail War in Fuyuki City, for example: the later the war, the worse the quality of the Servants summoned.

Based on the Matou Family's records, Shinji surmised that even the Heroic Spirits summoned in the first Holy Grail War had been far inferior to those he knew from FZ and FSN.

By the second war, their quality had become poor, and their strength was nowhere near the required standard. They were only a little stronger than ordinary people.

And so, the once "famous" Holy Grail War in Fuyuki City came to an end after only two iterations.

You could see the whole picture from one small part. The Holy Grail War's fate showed just how badly magecraft as a whole had declined in this world.

Against such a backdrop, the magi of the Nasuverse had little hope of achieving their lifelong wish—reaching the Root.

Gradually, the magi of this parallel world in the Nasuverse changed their outlook. They stopped tirelessly pursuing mystery and began treating magecraft as a rather extraordinary traditional craft.

Influenced by this shift in attitude, the old Nasuverse tradition of passing magecraft down through bloodlines also began to fade.

On the one hand, the magi's descendants felt magecraft was no damn use. It was even worse than a Trade School Training Manual; at least the latter could get them a stable job.

On the other hand, magi couldn't be sure that their next generation would live up to their expectations and inherit their magecraft.

But making magi watch the magecraft passed down from generation to generation die out was almost harder than killing them.

As a result, the master-apprentice relationship began to flourish in the world of magi. Institutions for teaching magecraft, like the Clock Tower, became even more prosperous than in the original Nasuverse, turning into the very heart of the magus community.

For Shinji, these differences from an ordinary Nasuverse weren't a bad thing.

No, they were a very good thing.

The decline of mystery meant that Makiri Zolgen, the Matou Family's founding ancestor, hadn't lived to five hundred.

During the second Holy Grail War, the old worm had been unable to prolong his life and had passed away, bound for the Western Paradise.

Of course, Shinji suspected the other man had simply taken his own life after realizing the Holy Grail was beyond his reach.

Although Shinji's grandfather was also named Matou Zouken and looked exactly like Master Yoda from Star Wars, this Grandpa Zouken was merely an ordinary magus who doted on his grandchildren.

The most obvious difference was that Shinji's position in the Matou Family had changed from [a dispensable Tool Person] in the original work to its true young master.

And though magecraft had fallen into decline, the Matou Family's status as wealthy landowners hadn't changed.

In the original work, the Matou Family had made a living by leasing Ley Lines. But after mystery declined, those Ley Lines had withered away one after another.

When it became clear that the Ley Lines were useless, Matou Zouken, who had only recently become the head of the family, simply waved his hand and started using the land for real estate development.

As it turned out, thanks to Japan's booming postwar economy, Matou Zouken's plan had brought the Matou Family considerable wealth.

Even though the collapse of the real estate industry during the subsequent bubble economy had greatly reduced the family's fortune,

Zouken's accumulated wealth still made the Matou Family local rich, even if it couldn't make them one of Japan's top-tier dynasties.

Looking at it this way, the decline of magecraft really had done Shinji, the transmigrator, nothing but good.

With a rich grandfather who doted on his grandchildren, Master Shinji had grown up living the life of a young master, with meals brought to him and clothes laid out for him.

And Shinji hadn't disappointed Matou Zouken.

Perhaps because of his transmigration, Shinji—whose magecraft talent had been terrible in the original work—had become the most talented magus the Matou Family had seen in generations.

Especially when it came to magecraft involving hypnosis, suggestion, control, illusions, and bounded fields, Shinji had learned with remarkable ease.

Though the general decline meant his magecraft couldn't compare with that of the geniuses in the original Nasuverse, it was more than enough to earn him the title of "prodigy" in this world.

Matou Zouken had come to regard Shinji as the Matou Family's hope for the future.

The only thing that displeased Matou Zouken was that Shinji wasn't particularly good at the Matou Family's traditional magecraft: creating Familiars, absorption, and water-based magecraft. Compared with his talent for other forms of magecraft, he was nowhere near as gifted in those areas.

This was mainly because Shinji himself wasn't especially interested in them.

Rather than playing with bugs or revitalizing magecraft, Shinji, a veteran otaku in both his lives, would rather do something he liked—for example, adapt his favorite anime into live-action movies.

It had been a dream of his in his previous life: to see the ACG works he loved adapted into big-budget films with Hollywood-level effects.

He specified Hollywood-level effects rather than simply Hollywood movies because of Hollywood's bizarre tastes and some of its screwed-up "correctness" rules.

Now that he'd finally become a young master in this life, Master Shinji naturally planned to make that dream come true himself.

Even better, the commercial film industry in this Nasuverse timeline was developing far more slowly than it had in the world Shinji came from.

Whether it was because of some mushroom-loving person's will or because this Nasuverse really had an alien Star Wars setting, the movie that had transformed the film industry—Star Wars—didn't exist in this world.

With the founding father of commercial cinema gone, the commercial films inspired by Star Wars had all but vanished, too.

Many classic movies and TV shows still existed, of course, such as the famous The Shawshank Redemption and Jeremy Brett's The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, which even Sherlock Holmes in the Nasuverse had praised. But almost all the big-budget blockbusters were missing.

As a result, the commercial potential of film in this world had only been explored at its most primitive level: box office sales and renting or selling videotapes.

There were no music CDs, no merchandise, and certainly no advanced business models like game-and-film tie-ins.

Here, film was an art form, and watching movies meant appreciating art.

"That's enough! How are we supposed to make commercial movies with a bunch of idiot artists like you?"

Faced with this twisted film industry, Shinji had slammed the table and decided to build the perfect entertainment empire himself.

And thanks to his status as a magus in this life, Shinji had come up with a truly earth-shattering plan: to use magecraft to film all kinds of anime.

In the course of researching magecraft, Shinji had discovered that many kinds of magecraft could be used in film production.

For example, magecraft could be used to make all kinds of props; Familiars could use magecraft to make animal actors behave; Explosion Magecraft could create safer yet more realistic explosions; and certain types of Illusion Magecraft could even be used to create movie post-production effects...

These forms of magecraft could not only reduce production costs, but also improve the quality of the finished work.

The relationship between magecraft and filmmaking was far closer than Shinji had initially thought.

Even in the future, when CG effects had become widespread, Hollywood would still need plenty of modelers, explosives technicians, and other special-effects professionals—never mind the film industry of this era, which lagged behind in every respect.

Seen that way, a low-cost, high-quality method of filming with magecraft might have a real market.