Sorry for the cliffhanger guys :)

I know a lot of you have questions but I am not going to answer them until I finish the story.Thanks.

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His hands are meticulous,

cutting through her flesh like he would cut up a steak,

her flesh is going to taste so good,

maybe he’ll mix in some interesting spices this time,

perhaps a bit of sage?

– annnnnd he’s back in Heechul’s essence, one finger stuck in projected eye goop.

Wonderful. What an image to have seared into Sungmin’ brain forever. Just wonderful. Really.

And now, because he has to document these for the eventual indictment hearing and later the trial in open court, he’s going to subject himself to another ten or so. Great.

Sungmin pokes at another one, and, joy of all joys, he’s being into another horrible memory –

it screams,

and the sound is like music to his ears, like a symphony.

He loves this part,

right when they break

and start begging for mercy that they know they’re not going to get,

he loves it

when he just digs through that wall

and shatters that stubbornness,

and he grins

as he plunges another illusion into its mind

making it relive one of its worst memories

over

and over

and

over again

– annnnnd Sungmin is back again, finger still unpleasantly wet and sticky from the eyeball.

He goes through the whole jar, just looking at a snippet from each one so he doesn’t go mad, and grudgingly copies them into his own memory banks as he goes. As expected, they are all horrifyingly inhumane. He finds Kyuhyun’s mother, Heechul’s memory of ripping her heart out, feels Heechul’s euphoria, and is especially disgusted. He shoves that particular memory into a ratty old torn up book and tosses it on the ground instead of putting it on the bookshelf with the others.

He’s glad he’s finally come to the last eyeball in the jar. He needs to just get this over with.

He taps it, and –

hie had a jdhhhr

dniiI and laughed at

the wuuuay he ns draggggAChd

but it waszssnt

tthhat CAKKir drummmahhhad anynthhinng to

giIiive him excepppt foor his

fuernccrrKKK annnnd

hiszszs zaz andrealllly he

rrhEERs breennnsjh

– and Sungmin gasps back into himself, mind spinning with confusion.

All the other memories had been easy to read – all Heechul’s thoughts were spelled out as clearly as the lines in a book. But this one was different, it was all high-pitched sounds and warps and bright lights. He couldn’t understand it at all, it was like a jarring, whirling kaleidoscope of sound and color.

It was almost... intentionally jumbled.

He turns to Heechul, who’s staring up at him with a strange gleam in his dead fish eyes. His thin mouth is stretched into a smile around his gag.

Sungmin narrows his eyes.

“You’ve done something to this one,” Sungmin says suspiciously. “Encrypted it. But not any of the others. Why?”

Heechul raises an eyebrow, and his smile stretches even more. His eyes flick to the gag in his mouth, then back up at him. Sungmin tightens his jaw. The last thing he wants to do is let Heechul speak, but what choice does he have? After a moment of weighing the pros and cons, he reluctantly pulls the rag out of Heechul’s mouth and lets it fall somewhere to his left.

“Tell me how to break the encryption,” Sungmin orders.

Heechul’s eyes are glittering with something dark and malicious, and his grin is stretching so wide he looks like a Cheshire cat. It’s raising the hairs on the back of Sungmin’ neck.

“If you have nothing to say, I’m stuffing the rag back in and leaving it there,” Sungmin snaps. “The encryption.”

There’s a pause, Heechul doesn’t cooperate, and Sungmin stoops to pick up the rag from where it landed on the floor.

“Really, Sungmin,” Heechul says silkily, before Sungmin has the chance to follow up on his threat. “What encryption?”

Sungmin is running out of patience with this awful excuse for a human being.

“The encryption you laid on it, so nobody can read it,” Sungmin says, clipped and slow, like he’s talking to a difficult child. “Now, tell me how to break it, or I’ll just work on breaking it myself. It’ll take a mite longer, but I’ll manage to crack it eventually.”

Heechul is still smirking up at him. His manner is really starting to get on Sungmin’ last nerve.

“There isn’t one,” Heechul says smugly. “Not on my memory. Scan it, by all means. You’ll see that I’m telling the truth.”

Sungmin rolls his eyes, but he runs a routine scan over the eyeball in question for any protective or scrambling spells with a scrying glass, and it all turns up negative.

Sungmin frowns. “But – ”

Heechul tries to say something else, but Sungmin doesn’t feel like humoring him again. So he stuffs the rag back in Heechul’s mouth and focuses on the problem at hand.

He’s sure this memory is encrypted, it’s the only explanation for why Sungmin can’t make heads or tails of it. Could there even be another explanation for –

The star ain’t shinin’, don’t have no fire

Sungmin blinks.

The words suddenly flared up in his mind like an inferno, straight from nowhere, blasting through anything he’d just been thinking about. Sungmin shakes his head and tries to refocus. Kangin’s little prophecy, or whatever he called it, isn’t exactly relevant right now.

Where was he? What was he thinking about just now?

The encrypted memory, right, and how it –

the shadow ain’t castin’, don’t have no soul

Kangin’s voice rumbles through all of his thoughts like a thunderstorm, like Kangin imprinted Sungmin’ mind with the words just as he said them. Again, it throws Sungmin off.

Sungmin lets out a breath and tries to calm his skittering mind, tries to put all his scattered thoughts back in order. He can’t let this happen right now, he can’t be distracted and imprecise, he needs to break this encryption, copy the memory