The crowd did not survive. Anyone who tried to approach became subject to absorption; tiny shadows slipped from the Everflame, devoured their breath and turned it into stones that inscribed their names upon the Throne's surface. The Throne grew, strengthened, and tightened, until Kim's chest resembled a chest of death-maps: stones, names, echoes of recorded screams.
When one of the guards summoned a final sacred beam to cut through the tide, Kim risked everything. The Arms of Doom made an extra rotation — he knew the maximum was near — the temporal volleys sharpened. The cycle gnawed into him: an intense pain like a plucked inner tendon. The old system screamed a mechanical warning in his lungs: "Alert — exceeded safe limit. Each additional second deducts from the user's life." But he did not stop.
The effect of that last cycle was devastating: the guard's beam reflected into the chaos of time itself and struck the Throne's mouth, touching its inner heart. Blood erupted, and the darkness convulsed as if used as a lens to intensify torment. He paid the price: moments of his life and shards of his humanity — a memory of a face, once a half-formed name in his chest, melted away. But it ended. Everyone who had stood before him that night became a scene on a black page.
The rubble quieted. The arena turned into a pyramid of ash and inscriptions. Kim rose slowly; his chest groaned, but his eyes were almost hollow — as though his heart had been poured into a book. He opened the cover of the "Book of Sin" again; new pages flashed, names vanished, and another stone was added to his Throne.
His internal system — the mechanical voice that had accompanied him long — rasped: "Alert — Hell reset available once only. You cannot return more than an hour. Tampering with time exposes you to the Curse of the Seraphs of Bliss."
Kim smiled coldly and replied in a soft voice, saturated with deadly audacity: "Let them curse. I will gather what remains of my power. From now on I will be the one who dispenses justice — or I will turn that justice into an unquenchable fire."
He took a single step forward. The Throne inside him grew heavier, but he also felt something awakening — neither human nor divine; something whose name might later become horror, salvation, or both. Amid the city's ruins, the book whispered his new name, emerging from his chest: "Tiger of Death — Prince of the Abyss."