The echo of the System's voice faded in his ears, yet it still thudded inside him like a hidden pulse, as if his mind had become a battlefield of dark secrets and illusions not yet seen clearly. "A king… its small copy… yes, but with an unseen shackle."
Kim began to walk with heavy steps across the shattered rooftops of a city that knew no rest; every corner told a tale of loss, and every shadow bore an unfamiliar face from his abandoned past. His memory was like an old chest full of broken stones—each stone carrying the voice of a person, a whisper of love, wounds that could not be erased.
Then suddenly a faint light sprang from the depths of his mind, coming from the King System—tools and privileges flashing like sparks in the dark, granting him the ability to summon shards of the past, to stitch their torn loops, though this gift came at a price.
"I will not become your slave," Kim muttered to himself, "but I will make them all slaves to my fear; I will set fire within their realms, and break the chains they tried to wind around my soul."
His heart responded with a new beat; unknown voices whispered to him to flee and to fight, cryptic counsel from nameless memories, scattering the mist of the past to reveal winding paths he had never known before.
On the horizon, far beyond clear sight, a shadow embraced the darkness, watching his next move—a more cunning player of the game, waiting for fortune to fall to its side.
Kim, king of ash, raised his head defiantly and shouted in a voice that pierced the city's silence, "In the days to come I will find all who toyed with me and write the ending… and who will judge the vaults of memory they tried to steal from me."
Then, with a swift motion, he sprang into the unknown, where the borders between authority and freedom blur, and where new horrors lie between truth and imagination, waiting to be revealed. The fire in his chest burned hotter, and his resolve did not wane—he knew the battle to reclaim himself had only just begun.