"In my vision I imagined your father as the Lucifer, frozen at the center of it all, chewing on three sinners." Atiya let the pause sit. "You, your mother, and Screja."
The cell went still.
Fredo did not move for a moment, something behind his eyes working through what he had just heard.
*How does he know about my family.*
"I obtained a memory crystal and saw your father's memories directly, and here is the truth of it, he is dead, freed of the curse, and he never once paid for what he did, not a single consequence."
It was not entirely accurate. He had seen the memories, that much was real. The rest he was shaping into something pointed because the man across from him had been planning to sacrifice him and Atiya saw no reason to be gentle about it.
Fredo's jaw tightened.
"Sin." The word came out measured and deliberate. "You chopped Screja to pieces and burned what was left, she was my friend, you are as sinful as anyone in this village."
"We were stripped of everything that makes life worth living, every sensation, every comfort, every small happiness, and what we do we do to survive, the same as you do everything you do to survive."
Atiya looked at him for a moment.
"Sure, carry on with that," he said, a short exhale through his nose. "I hate all of you, I want that on record, but if I had been born into your situation I cannot honestly say I would have done anything differently."
"Let me be direct with you, you will lose your life tomorrow, you have been unconscious for days."
Fredo's voice carried no particular cruelty in it, just the flat delivery of someone stating a fact they have long since made peace with.
"Any dish you would like to eat?"
"I would rather starve, who knows what you would put in it."
Atiya shifted slightly against the chains, the metal cold through the fabric of his robe.
"Suit yourself."
Fredo rose from the floor and straightened his robes, preparing to leave.
"Running away? Afraid I might say something ridiculous, like your father is coming back to chew on you?" Atiya watched him move toward the door. "How pitiful you are, utterly and laughably pitiful."
He meant it completely.
He knew only a fraction of what Fredo had lived through, had caught glimpses of it through borrowed memory and nothing more, and even that fraction was enough to sit heavy.
A childhood spent watching his mother destroyed in front of him, Screja being raped repeatedly, the weight of leading a dying species through milleniums of manufactured suffering, all of it traceable back to one man who had felt nothing doing any of it.
And if Kallar's rebirth skill worked as described, Fredo and every last villager would die by that same man's hand before long, reborn into a new body and carrying the same appetite for domination into a fresh existence.
His own life was more precious than theirs. That was simply the truth of how he calculated things and he was not going to pretend otherwise.
But he had failed to escape and miracles were what remained when plans ran out, so miracles were what he was working with now.
Except for one thing.
He had a plan, even if Kallar did not come.
Leishna was the plan. Leishna was the trump card.
Night came and Atiya tried to sleep and could not.
He lay against the cold stone wall with the chains settled into their familiar weight and turned everything over in his head, assembling what he had into something coherent.
A specific line from the memories kept surfacing.
*I did not want to soil my skill with worthless women.*
He sat with that for a while.
If Kallar had considered women inferior and therefore unusable for his coding purposes, it would explain the abnormal ratio of women to men in the village.
The men had not simply disappeared over centuries of sealed existence. They could have become materials or ingredients.
'I should have asked Fredo about that.'
He filed it away and kept pulling the thread.
'Did they even reproduce normally, assuming most of the males were used up? And if they did reproduce, how? And how did the villagers return to a functional state after each human sacrifice? The curse should have held regardless of anything.'
The only answer that made sense was that the original skill coded by the traveler had been acquired somewhere along the way, either by the demonness or by Kallar himself.
If the source of the curse was in someone's hands rather than simply running loose, then the conditions for lifting it could be controlled, managed, turned on and off like a mechanism rather than endured like weather.
Which meant the whole arrangement had been deliberate from a point much earlier than anyone in the village likely knew.
He stared at the chain and kept thinking.
****
Zelaine had brought out tea for the customer.
The customer seemed to be tired so he took a sip and respectfully said.
"Um, I see, you don't like sugars."
Zelaine felt a nostalgia at the moment. A scene of past played in her mind. It was when Atiya was sick and his mother was away. So she and Cale went to visit him.
"Get out, my fever is already bad as it is, I don't want headache," Atiya said bluntly, already having headaches.
"Do you want porridge or something?" Zelaine tried to be compassionate.
"Do you think I am Korean? Nah, just make something edible without oil."
Zelaine made rice cake and gave it to him.
"She is gonna kil you, I should have been the one to cook," Cale regretted seeing Zelaine pouring a cup of tea for Atiya.
Atiya too facepalmed while inside being in bed. His eyes drifted on dozens of beer cans they have brought.
'They are not here to take care of me, they are here to party.'
Atiya took the cup of tea given by Zelaine and took a sip of it.
"It's too sweet, throw it away."
Atiya preferred spicy things over sweet things unless it's ice cream. Zelaine then nonchalantly drank the same cup of tea in one mouthful.
'This.....'
Zelaine remembered something, she had only put two spoons of sugar in a whole one-liter flask.
"You fucker, are you sugar sensitive or what? Keep up like this and you will turn into Wall Breaker soon."
Those were the golden times.
"I am sorry, I forgot to add sugars in it," Zelaine apologised to the customer.
The customer waved his hand dismissively. "No, no, it's quite alright. I've just been... on edge."
"Please, tell us about your job."
The Old Man acted quite professionally and asked, his demeanor shifting instantly into business mode. The customer took another sip of his sugarless tea and began the description of the job.
"I own multiple salons here in the town and have one problem. Actually, I want you guys to stay a night at a salon of mine. People claimed they have been seeing a man with a blonde wig."
"So what's the problem with that?" Zelaine was a little confused about what problem one would have with a man in a wig. In her experience, weird fashion choices were the least dangerous things in the world.
"I got lots of complaints and people avoid going there," the customer continued, his voice dropping an octave. "So I decided to check what the fuck is going on and—boom—it didn't spare me from hallucinating too. You see, I even heard screams of women from inside at midnight. I went inside to check. At first, I saw nothing. Then, sometime later, when I searched for a bottle of water to drink, a bald girl with her head covered in blood gave me a bottle of water."
The customer shuddered and stopped at that, his hands shaking slightly against the teacup. "I got startled and ran outside the salon. So I want you guys to check if there is any spirit there."
"What a scaredy cat," Zelaine softly said to herself. The Old Man heard it and gave her a sharp eye, silently telling her to keep the commentary to herself while a paying client was present.
Now, the Old Man with his signature shades and Zelaine were standing in front of the salon.
The salon was indeed quite beautiful, a stark contrast to the horrific tale the customer had just spun.
Large, circular backlit mirrors stood like glowing portals in the center of the room, reflecting the clean white walls and polished floors.
The lighting was modern and bright, casting a professional sheen over the rows of empty styling chairs.
Zelaine scanned the room, her eyes darting across the sleek surfaces. It looked more like a high-end gallery than a place where a blood-covered girl would hand out water bottles. The Old Man adjusted his shades, his presence heavy and silent as he took in the layout.
"It's too clean," Zelaine muttered, her hand twitching toward where her Yai cubes usually materialized. "Hard to believe a 'blonde-wigged man' would want to haunt a place that looks this expensive."
The Old Man didn't reply immediately. He walked toward one of the central mirrors, his reflection stretching out in the ring of light. "The prettiest places usually hide the ugliest bugs, Zelaine. Keep your eyes open."
The three of them began to search for anything that might have residues of Yai. While spirits and ghosts do exist, they must use Yai to maintain their existence; therefore, if anything of that sort were present, Yai residues should have been found.
The salon owner, the customer, seemed tense and scared, sticking himself close to the Old Man for protection. They were touching almost everything in the room to detect traces—or at least, the Old Man was doing the heavy lifting.
Zelaine, however, was distracted by the aesthetics of the place. She eyed the makeup kits and studied the hairstyles displayed on the walls.
Her current style featured a bang covering one of her eyes, frankly, it was her favorite, though she was known to change her hairstyle very often.
"There's nothing here, let's get down to the basement," the Old Man said.
'Basement... he did mention there was a basement here,' Zelaine thought, following them down.
Once inside the basement, they found it was literally empty.
"This basement... I heard the last owner of this salon used to store mannequins here," the customer explained nervously. "I heard that the mannequins were all burned down by the last owner."
Zelaine checked the surroundings and touched the walls and floor. Still, there were no traces of Yai. Despite the lack of evidence, her heart felt heavy, a lingering sense of dread settling in her chest.
The Old Man didn't seem satisfied with the silence. He began to draw a large circle on the floor using water from plastic bottles and started chanting in a low, rhythmic tone.
"Oh balancer of forests, tell me what happened here."
As the Old Man chanted, the air in the basement grew heavy, and visions began to flood his mind.
He saw a woman tied down by ropes, her body twitching as she silently begged for help, unable to move a single muscle. Then, a bald man entered the room and killed her. He didn't just stop there; he began ripping out her hair roots, taking the hair for himself. The vision flickered, showing the man repeating this gruesome act multiple times with different victims.
Then, the scene shifted. One day, the roles were reversed. A woman had bound the bald man, casting a powerful Yaicraft that left him completely paralyzed. She began to skin him alive while he was still conscious. The man screamed for help, begging her to stop, but just as he had never listened to his victims, the woman remained deaf to his pleas.
The vision snapped shut, leaving the basement in a cold silence.
"What did you see... sir?" the customer asked, his voice trembling as he looked at the Old Man's grim expression.
The Old Man just shrugged it off, keeping his composure even though the weight of the brutality was evident. He then turned to them and told them exactly what he had seen: the cycle of torture, the stolen hair, and the final, skinless vengeance that had soaked the foundations of the building.
"This case is related to serial murders. Find out about missing girls....when did this happen, any idea mr. Carl."
Mr. Carl, the customer, pondered for a while at that revelation before suggesting, "Let's check about the previous owners."
Zelaine thought that was the best choice. 'If the baldy he saw in the vision was one of the previous owners, then the victims must be customers.'