Project After Life

"Come in," Dec hollered from inside the room. He was tired from meeting the inmates, tired from repeating the same spiel. He still managed to smile at the middle aged man who stepped in the room, his stress temporarily forgotten.

"Hey Jatin!" Dev got up and hugged the prisoner who smiled shyly. Dev was a healer by profession, treating the malaise in the bodies of the patients. He was quite good at his job. Meeting people, enquiring about their thoughts and attitudes, figuring out a proper diet and plan for medicines, it kept him on his toes. He was quite outspoken and he had been overheard many times that he was glad that people fell sick for otherwise they would never come to pay him a visit. His patients seemed to not mind his bluntness for they knew that Dev always cared for them. One day a visitor from the palace sought an appointment with Dev. The lanky guy who never smiled informed Dev that he had been chosen to work exclusively on a top secret mission. Dev did not know the visitor but he knew the person accompanying the visitor. Roshan was a high flying spy who superseded the mayor. Dev observed how servile Roshan behaved in the presence of the visitor and understood that he was in the presence of royalty. Later he came to know that it was Omar who had personally paid him a visit. Everyone knew Omar, the cousin of their king. When Omar decreed something, it was obviously coming from the king himself and Dev gladly acquiesced. He was then blindfolded and brought to a prison compound.

There were four wings in the prison and for some reason the wings were kept separate from each other. Inmates of wing 1 were not aware of inmates from the wing 2, 3 or 4. The warden, Raka, made it very clear to Dev about the need to keep the prisoners segregated. There were about 100 inmates in each wing, each one of them allowed to have their family with them. At any point of time, around 10 of them requested treatment. Dev found the job to be a sinecure. He just had to be very alert to not blurt out anything about prisoners of other wings. He knew that he would not only lose his job if he messed up, he could lose his life too.

That day, Dev was posted in wing number 1. Jatin had approached him some weeks back about his strange dreams and how they were causing great discomfort to him and how he was scared of falling asleep. Initially he did not want to talk about his dreams but Dev cajoled him till he opened up. The more Dev chatted with Jatin, the less sense the dreams made. For Dev, it became a challenge that he needed to solve.

"So did you dream again last night?" Dev asked Jatin who settled down on his couch. Jatin looked tired and the dark circles under his eyes made him look haggard and sickly.

"Yes," Jatin nodded, "it is the same one."

The same dream implied the series of dreams that Jatin had been seeing for the past six months. In each of these dreams, he found himself to be in a house with a woman and two young girls. In his dreams, the woman and the kids always died by his hands. The nature of the deaths varied but they were always murdered by Jatin. The nightmares were so vivid that Jatin avoided sleeping but insomnia was not at all good for him. He developed many diseases due to his lack of sleep. When Dev learnt about it, he began to give a drug to Jatin to make him fall asleep. The drug made Jatin comatose so that he stopped dreaming. Some days back, Dev decided to tone down on the quantity of the drugs and the nightmares returned for Jatin.

“Do you ever recall if you have visited the house,” Dev asked Jatin, “or if you have met that woman or the kids?”

“Sometimes I believe that I have met them,” Jatin whispered, “but when I try to think about where I saw them or where I met them, then I begin to get a severe headache.”

Dev checked his notebook. He had begun to use separate notebooks for the prison compounds. Under the name of Jatin, he noticed the name of Bishu.

“Your son,” Dev asked Jatin, “Bishu is his name, right? How is he doing?”

“He is doing great,” Jatin's face lighted up. He truly loved his son. “He will turn 14 next week. Children grow up so fast these days!”

For a couple of minutes, Jatin spoke about Bishu and how his son had been able to choose his line of work. Bishu had chosen to become a soldier and he was already spending a lot of time in exercising and practicing with a sword. Jatin seemed very proud of his son's exploits. When Dev asked if Bishu suffered with nightmares, Jatin confessed that sometimes his kid was pursued by a giant snake in his dreams but the nightmares did not affect Bishu much.

“After all, he doesn't get to see bloodied bodies of kids!” Jatin remarked drily.

Dev increased the dosage of the drug so that Jatin could get a good night's sleep. Jatin promised to visit the next week and left. He was the very last patient so Dev wrapped up and went back to his house. The soldiers protecting the prison compound stayed in the center. Dev had been allocated a small one room house to keep his stuff.

Dev picked up his notebook for the wing 3 and flipped pages hurriedly to find an entry. Some weeks back, a patient had come for his headaches. During the course of their discussion, the patient had mentioned that he suffered from nightmares. The name of the prisoner was Jiban and he had a son Amol who was 14 years old. In his dreams, Jiban too dreamt of a young woman and two kids who all were murdered by him. There were many similarities between the dreams of Jiban and Jatin. Dev had been able to get many details of Jatin who was quite talkative but Jiban did not like to talk much. As Jiban never sought his help for his nightmares, Dev had no reason to force an appointment on Jiban. Even though Dev was very curious about Jiban's nightmares, he had to drop the idea of pursuing Jiban for he did not want to upset the prison warden. For some moments, Dev read Jiban's case file and then put the notebooks aside. He wondered how could two people have same nightmares. Even though both Jiban and Jatin were imprisoned in the same compound, they had never been allowed to meet. It was a problem that Dev wanted to solve desperately but his hands were tied and his data set was limited. All he could do was make conjectures about the nature of the problem. He didn't know who to discuss the strange similarities in the nightmares suffered by the prisoners. He had been explicitly told to keep his mouth shut.

Jatin did not visit him in the next week. It worried Dev for he feared Jatin must have run out of his medicines. When Dev raised the matter with the warden, he was rudely reminded to focus on the living and that the dead have to be forgotten. After about two weeks of Jatin not being seen, Dev finally got an update from another inmate that Jatin and his son had gone to meet the demon. That was just another way to say that Jatin and his son had been killed by the guards.

One month later, a new inmate from wing 1 sought out Dev.

"I need some drugs to make me sleep," the new patient said. "I have been having stupid nightmares and I can't sleep."

On Dev's prodding, the new patient, whose name was Prakash, spoke about a young woman and her two kids getting murdered by his hands.

"The dreams are too realistic," Prakash shuddered. "I see blood on my hands, on my dress, on my face. I am too scared to sleep."

Dev gave him some medicines and asked about his family. Prakash had a son Shlok who was 11 years old.

"Shlok wants to become a soldier," Prakash's face lit up as he spoke about his son. "I think he is very good at sword play." He could have talked more about his son's prowess but the look of alarm on the healer's face shut him up. He got up and walked away muttering “Healer, heal thyself first!”

Dev could have reacted to that taunt if he were in a proper frame of mind. He could not even bring himself to note down the details of Prakash in his notebook for wing number 1. A heavy cloud seemed to settle on him and made his movement sluggish. His thoughts kept going back to the common, shared nightmares among the various patients and he could not focus on his work. When he would not call the next patient in, the orderly peeped in to check on the healer. Before the orderly could hail the healer, Dev slid down his chair and fell on the floor. He was not unconscious but he was unable to move his body. The patients helped Dev to his room and left him alone. The orderly was punctilious enough to bring all the notebooks safely to Dev's room.

When Dev would not come out for dinner, the warden paid him a visit. One look at the harrowed face of Dev was more than enough to tell the warden that the healer had run out of his utility, that it was time to get a new healer. That night itself, two soldiers dragged Dev's limp body out of the compound. They left Dev about three miles from the prison and returned to their barracks.

Dev could see that he was right in the middle of a forest but he could not make himself move. It was as if his mind had decided to take a vacation leaving the body to thrash about on its own. His senses were registering events but there was no one to listen to them. When things could not have gotten worse, something happened that made Dev snap back into alertness. It was the sound of the trinkets that seemed to be approaching him. The strange sound made Dev turn his head and listen carefully. When Dev heard two kids giggle, a nameless terror began to form knots in his stomach. With a cry, he got up and tried to merge with the tree behind him. Pretty soon he noticed a lady and two kids approaching him. The lady was carrying a lantern in her right hand and with her left hand she was guiding the two little kids.

“Look what we got here,” the lady smiled. It was enough to make Dev tremble wildly.

“He is already scared,” one of the kids said in a bored voice. “He wouldn't be fun.”

“Fun?” The second kid growled. “Is that all that matters to you?”

“Stop bickering, children!” The lady chided her two children who pouted and glared at each other. The eldest girl detached her hand from her mother's hand and the youngest girl took this opportunity to sidle closer to her mother.

“Who are you?” Dev managed to whisper. The lady's smile got deeper and her eyes began to sparkle. Dev was mesmerized by the transformation in her face. He felt as if he had never seen any one so beautiful ever in his life. That was the moment when he realized that love could arise out of fear. The more he looked at the smiling lady, the more enamored he felt of her. He did not want to tear off his eyes from her face. She looked so hauntingly beautiful that he forgot to breathe. He did not even notice the eldest kid approach him stealthily and did not even notice her stabbing him. His foggy mind did not even register the pain from the wound immediately. When the girl tried to stab him again, he became aware of the wound in his guts and the dagger in her hand. Without thinking he lashed out at her. His casual blow should have pushed the little kid back but the blow on the kid's face was more than enough to knock her off her feet. The kid fell and the dagger went right through her neck. The kid began to sputter and blood began to flow in torrents out of her gaping wound. She writhed on the ground for some moments before her lifeless body fell limp.

There were three people standing witness to the death of the kid but no one among them made any move to help her. When the kid finally stopped moving, her mother became cognizant and she rent out a cry that made Dev cover his ears. Her youngest child, who stood next to her mother, let her mother's hands go and rushed towards the dagger. Dev moved faster than her and was able to grab on to the dagger but the little kid jumped on him and clawed his face. Dev swung his arms around to push her away and the next moment he found that he had managed to stab the little kid in her chest. He knelt beside her body and tried to staunch the blood flow but with a heartrending cry, the little girl died in his arms.

Dev looked up towards the mother of the two kids expecting her to lash at him for taking the lives of her two kids but he was not ready to see her burst out in laughter. Dev assumed that she was in a state of great shock on finding her two kids dead and approached her slowly trying to figure out how to make her stop laughing so raucously. By the time he reached her, tears had begun to flow out of her eyes.

“That was good,” she wiped her tears. Dev was just glad that she stopped laughing. It was grotesque and it got on Dev's nerves.

“I am sorry,” Dev muttered. “You must understand! It was all an accident.”

“I agree,” the lady put her right hand on Dev's left shoulder. “It happens to the best of us. And these little kids, they are so fragile, right? One blow is sometimes all it needs to kill them. Trust me on that!”

Before Dev could react to her, she kneed him in the groin. The blow was so unexpected that Dev's body could not even flinch. One moment he was looking at the frozen smile on her face, the next moment he blacked out from the terrible blow on his family jewels. When he woke up, he found that he was all alone in the forest. He glanced at his bloodied hands and was reminded of his ghastly crimes. The lady must have taken the dead bodies of her kids with her but the ground was still bloodied. It made Dev puke. He felt miserable and weak. His head swam when he tried to move away from the crime scene and he settled down under a tree. He tried desperately to regain his breath and wondered how he could get in such a bad shape as to not be able to even walk a few paces. The sudden rustling of leaves above him made him look up and his breath got knocked out of his body when he saw a huge boa constrictor look down on him.

Dev tried to scramble away but his body once again refused to help him. The boa constrictor slithered towards him leisurely. Dev could not take his eyes off the eyes of the boa. The boa finally reached the ground and then it began to curl around Dev's body. The cold skin of the reptile felt strange to Dev but it was not enough to break the hypnotic effect of its eyes on Dev. When the snake finally began to crush Dev's body, he was able to look away from the great snake's eyes. The heaviness of the boa on his body suffocated him. He screamed loudly but for some reason all he could hear was the ghastly death cries of the little kids who he had murdered.

Before he passed out, he noticed a halo of light approaching them. Then he blacked out again. When he came to his senses, he found himself to be lying under a tree. He gave a muted scream and scampered away in blind panic but he soon calmed down when he found that there was no boa constrictor around him. Then he noticed a lantern behind a tree. He ran up to the tree and took a peek. He found the lady seated on the grassy knoll with her two kids. All three of them seemed to be waiting for him.

“Oh, he is finally here,” the lady exclaimed. The two kids waved at him with whoops of cheer. Dev recalled the gory details of their last encounter and stayed frozen at his spot but the lady and the two kids kept calling to him and he dragged his legs towards them.

“Sit here,” the lady patted the patch of grass next to her. “We have a lot to tell you.”

“We gave the boa a good beating,” the eldest child smiled.

“Yes,” the little kid immediately chimed in. “We gave it a good beating.”

“Now it will never come to our ground,” the eldest child continued.

“Yes,” the little kid clapped her hands once. “It kept forgetting its place but after today it will not show its face here again.”

“What's going on?” Dev whined.

“Have you read your scriptures?” The lady asked Dev ignoring his question. Dev was left flummoxed and he could not bring himself to answer the question.

“Never, right?” The lady smiled. “If you had attended the boring classes on spirituality and how best to lead life, may be today you would be in a better position to understand what is happening to you. I am not a teacher and I am most definitely not going to give you a short refresher course. So don't ask me questions. Now have you heard the term 'after life'?”

The term made Dev wince. He had always mocked the concept of after life and he hated the very mention of the words heaven or hell. He believed that when people died, they died for good and all other nonsense about good 'karmas' was essentially a ruse to trap people into following the orders of the ruling class. Taking the example of the tenet 'always follow the king's orders for the king has divine powers', he would rip apart the philosophy behind having such tenets that served to enslave poor people. He believed that all the acts that earned good 'karma' were designed to keep people's behaviour in check. He wanted to break free from the chains of the slavery but he did not have the guts to start a revolution. All he could do was to crib and to take pot-shots at the precepts enshrined in holy books.

“Are we in hell?” His voice quivered.

“No, buddy,” the eldest child shook her head. “Hell is where you will go once we are done with you.”

“Yes,” the little girl copied her sister's mannerism. “Once we are done, you will go to hell but not now!”

Dev tried to stifle his sobs. All his bravado in rejecting the holy books was destroyed in one blow. He wanted to ascend to the heaven, purely based on the merits of him helping out the sick and the needy. He took care to never ever do any wrong for it was his secret desire to avoid hell and to go to the heaven.

“Are you crying?” The lady sneered at him. “Save some tears for later.”

“Why?” Dev managed to ask.

“Why what?” The lady scoffed at him. “Why are you being sent to hell? Or why are you still stuck here?”

“Still stuck here?”

“Good question!” The lady sighed. “When someone dies in your realm, they get sent here. It is a huge world out here and long time back we all used to poach on the unsuspecting victims. Sometimes there were turf wars and lot of blood was shed. As you can see, we can't die but we can spill blood when we get injured. So when the land was lawless, the victims were dragged from one master to another, to suffer nightmares of various hues. Now that you have suffered two nightmares, you would understand just what we are talking about. Imagine this place if you can when all the masters and their various team members went about making a grab at the recently deceased and then filling their memories with nightmares. It was almost hell. You must understand that hell is something else. What happens there stays there. Whatever information trickles out of that place makes us sweat badly. So one of you dies, he comes here, we torture them and then he either gets sent to hell or he is sent back. Not reincarnated! Do not confuse reincarnation with this experience! You will be revived in your world soon. But some of the nightmares suffered here will remain in your pysche. Some of our messages stay cooped up in your consciousness. If you persuade properly, you all forsake the path of good and indulge in evil acts, the seeds of which we placed. It is a glorious job that we do here.”

“Glorious!” The youngest kid repeated the word.

“Simply glorious!” The eldest kid was not going to be left behind.

“But I want to go to heaven,” Dev broke down.

“Seriously?” The lady wondered. “When I was able to peek at your life story, all I could sense was your vindictiveness and your pettiness. Isn't it true that when Shaan got injured, you deliberately went slow on his medication to prolong his sickness? Why did you do that? Just because you were unhappy that your crush Bhoomika liked Shaan more? Then there was Mandira. You had a tiff with her, right? And then you prayed fervently to your gods to make her sick! And you did that for months. All the time you only wanted her as a patient so that you could torture her with your treatment. How petty was that? How evil?”

“So did she fall sick?” The eldest kid was very curious.

“Oh, yes!” The lady replied. “She met with an accident and was brought to his clinic and he gave her experimental drugs that made her suffer more. You truly are evil! We hurt people here all the time but that is what we do! That is what is expected of us! But you? You are a healer! You are supposed to make your patients well and all you did was make them worse.”

“Only two of them,” Dev protested.

“What was that?” The lady smirked. “I just now told you that I know your entire life story and you still persist in lying to me. You rejoiced when the epidemic spread in your region. You treated scores of the patients and made a little fortune out of their misery. That is so horrible! You could have treated them for free but you forced them to pay. There were many cases where you refused to give medicines to families who had nothing to offer to you. You sucked them dry and then left them to die. You are worse than the blood sucking monsters we have here because whatever you do, you do under the guise of doing good to the society.”

“But, but I treated so many of them,” Dev persisted. “There were times when long suffering patients would come to me and then I would find the right treatment to them. I have helped many people too. I am not an evil person. I am just a human being. I never claimed to be a saint. I did whatever I had to do to support my family.”

“Right, right,” the lady dismissed him with a wave of her hand. “It is true that you were always ready to help people who had been sick for years but you did not do so to help them. Your intention was to make money from them. Let us take the example of Yashobai. She had been sick for around 10 years before her family sought your help. You did not have any idea on how to treat her but you accepted the case and then went on a pilgrimage. That's what you told them, right? But in reality, you visited your teacher Kripal and took his help in figuring out a proper course of treatment. You made a fortune from Yashobai but you never shared even one coin with your teacher. Not many people could sense your intention of bleeding them dry and they were happy to get well so they praised you and the fame went to your head. When Lakhobai did not agree to your exorbitant demand, you ensured that no other healer in your region treated her. She suffered terribly because you would not let her get treatment.”

Dev wiped his tears. “But I was the one selected for the prison duty,” he pointed out. “No one wanted to do it. I volunteered for it.”

“Well, that's a lie too,” the lady shook her head.

“He is a liar!” The eldest kid was now convinced.

“Liar, liar! Pants on fire!” The youngest kid taunted Dev.

“Girls!” The lady called and the kids fell silent.

“You never volunteered,” the lady addressed Dev. “They came to your house and they gave the order. You simply accepted it with alacrity. Also the amount offered to you for the job was more than commensurate. So you agreed to become the healer of the prison and then you were shifted to the compound. Your eyes were blindfolded but you didn't care for you had been told that the location of the compound was a secret. And in that state, you were brought to the prison compound and left alone to do your stuff.”

“Ma, why was the prison's location a secret?” The youngest kid asked.

“Because they don't want anyone to know how badly they treat their citizens,” the lady replied. “There are no prisoners in the prison compound. They are ordinary citizens who had been kidnapped and brought here. Their minds are then tortured to make them forget their past and to accept their new families. They are fed drugs that make their minds weak. They are killed and sent here. Then they are revived but before that we get to feast on them. Before they are awakened, we add our memories to their consciousness. Then they begin to suffer with nightmares. Sometimes the process has to be repeated twice but it is a rarity. One encounter with us is more than enough for almost all of them.”

“What do you get by tormenting us so much?” Dev asked petulantly. He was certain that he was going to get the same treatment as others and he knew that politeness would not save him from the lady.

“Ah, good,” the lady smiled. “Petulance! Irritation! So you now begin to believe that you should not be scared of us?”

“After all,” Dev made a wry face, “all that you can do is die by my hands. Now I know that you can never die, so that implies that I never actually killed you. So why should I be scared of you?”

The transformation of the lady's face did not unnoticed by Dev. Before he could even begin to apologize, the lady and her two kids transformed into winged harpies with big, sharp claws and talons. The three of them beat Dev mercilessly. The beatings went on and on. Dev kept passing out but the trio did not show any mercy. The cycle went uninterrupted for days. Dev became progressively weaker, his mind became more and more fragile. The mere sight of a harpy rushing at him made him piss his pants. The mere sound of their war cries made him puke. He did not have the strength to run away or to even defend himself. The harpies would throw him around like a rag doll and then stomp on his face till he passed out. The sun never rose in the world of the after life. Dev would wake up to see the dim light of a lantern and then get attacked to pass out again.

Once on waking up, he found himself to be bathed in the sunlight. The bright daylight made him squint his eyes. He looked around fearfully to check on the harpies but there were no signs of the trio who had tortured him so badly. When he heard some people chatting, he could not trust his ears. He hid behind a tree to check if the harpies had not returned. There were some soldiers looking around and when they spotted Dev, they gave a loud cheer and rushed towards them. Their sudden movement made Dev's heart skip some beats and he passed out again.

The next time he woke up, he was in his room in the prison compound. The orderly seated outside immediately alerted the warden who visited him shortly.

“Your heart stopped beating when we rescued you,” Raka informed Dev. “You were clinically dead for about 10 days.”

“How long has it been since I have been sick?” Dev asked the warden who glanced once at the orderly who stood next to the bed.

“Around 20 days,” Raka replied. “You decided to take a hike in the forest even though we had always warned you against it. And then you disappeared. Every day my men would look around for you. After five days, I had given up hopes of finding you alive but Roshan pushed me to have faith in your surviving abilities. It is very strange that you were able to survive for 10 days out there in the forest. You were in a very bad condition. You were not only emaciated but you had not had any water for days and it made you hallucinate. And then your heart finally gave in. You are very lucky that Roshan had sent another healer and he was able to save your life.”

The mention of a new healer filled joy in Dev's heart. It implied that he could return back to his house. When he asked the warden about his tentative day of leaving the prison compound, the warden told him that it was a call that only Roshan could make. After making proper noises, the warden left Dev alone. That very night, Dev suffered a debilitating nightmare about a young woman and her two kids who died at his hands. A primal fear sent him off the edge of sanity. He screamed for hours and then passed out. The new healer could not make sense of the problem. It was just a nightmare but for Dev it was as real as it could be. Finally a strong sedative was administered to Dev to knock him out.

Roshan got all the updates about Dev from the warden and the new healer.

“Well,” Roshan rubbed his hands in delight. “We have him exactly where we wanted him to. He is now a putty to us. Send him to Cholam town. They need people like him.”

Roshan then left the prison compound in high spirits. The entire operation was very successful. When Pranesh had got the details of the operation from Omar himself, the confidante of the king, he was very skeptical about it. It was easier to dream of making mindless drones who would work according to the king's whims but the success of such operations had been quite low. People whose minds were tampered with slid towards insanity and became useless after some time. But the new plan of Omar had been truly successful. Many law abiding citizens were kidnapped and then made to forget their entire past. The drugs administered to them caused severe memory losses and when the patients tried to fill in the gaps, they were helped by the trained personnel who supplied critical bits of information through hypnosis or through induced nightmares. Jatin was convinced that he had a son. Bishu was made to believe that his father was Jatin. They were deemed to be fit for active duty and sent to join their respective teams. Bishu was made to believe that Jatin had been murdered by the spies of Abitsar. Jatin, on the other hand, was grieved to know that his son had been murdered by the direct order of the hunch back prince of Abitsar. Bishu fought on the border to hunt down the spies from Abitsar. Jatin was en route to Abitsar to assassinate their prince. They were the shining examples of the success of the operation code named 'afterlife'. The success of the idea made them make more copies of a father and a son so they were still working on Jabin and Amol. The pair of Prakash and Shlok looked promising too.

Roshan had no idea of what happened to the people who were sent to the forest. He did not have the clearance to know about the secret part of the operation that turned the minds of the men to jelly. The secret of the world of the after life was known only to Omar and to the person he reported to. Roshan personally delivered the news about Dev to Omar and did not even understand why Omar was left electrified at Dev's case file. Omar dismissed him peremptorily and re-read the case file of Dev carefully.

“For the first time,” he wrote in his notes, “we have seen a monster residing in the nightmarish world of one person travel to the nightmarish world of another human. We have been able to successfully create a nightmarish world for one person but we have never been able to connect these worlds. That was not our original intention and yet, I am left very enthused at the prospect of linking these dream worlds. Your original idea of creating a nightmare world for a person has been found to be astoundingly successful. For Jatin's case, we were able to feed the story of a lady and her two kids to him and we were able to manipulate those memories through the hypnotic suggestions. Jatin lived and relived the murder of the lady and her two kids so many times that they became a part of his core memory. Fear and dread are the tools that we employ to tamper with the patient's memories for they are the only emotions that leave their traces in the human body for a long, long time. For Bishu, we used the boa constrictor as the monster that hounded him and left him scared for his life. Even though Jatin and Bishu lived together and shared their nightmares with each other, they stayed in their separate worlds. Bishu never ever saw the lady and her two kids in his nightmares even though he had heard about them from Jatin. Likewise, Jatin never faced the boa constrictor in his nightmares even though he had heard about it from Bishu. And then we have the case of Dev who was deliberately exposed to the stories of the lady and the two kids. We began working on his mind through the accounts of the nightmares from various patients. At no point of time, he was exposed to the boa constrictor trope and yet when he was forced into his nightmarish world, his world got populated with both the lady and her two kids trope and the boa constrictor trope. This is a marvelous news. I believe that it gives credence to the discarded theory that the human mind is connected with each other. Even though you discarded that theory, I would like to insist upon you to revisit the theory. I can feel in my guts that we are onto something huge here. Dev will be soon moved to the Team 27-3 to work on creating new venom strains. Everything goes according to your plan.”

He sealed his report along with Dev's case file and marked it to CK. The guard posted outside glanced once at the name on the sealed box and galloped towards the palace. The 'K' in the name stood for the king but he could never understand what 'C' stood for. The sealed box was delivered to the palace guard who took it to the king's personal room and left it on the table there. Everyone in the palace believed that the package was meant for the king but it was the youngest prince who grabbed the package and went bounding towards his room. The package was meant for him, the child king. He whooped once as he entered his room and slid towards his chair. Once he reached the chair, he dropped the juvenile act and sat down with a serious look. After all, serious business could not be handled with levity. It was the way he loved to rule till he became of age to claim his throne. He just needed to wait patiently and rule through the people he trusted who got his plans executed. The entire operation of 'afterlife' was his brain child and he was really happy to learn about its success. Omar's idea of the oneness of the nightmarish world of all humans did not seem too appealing to him previously but Dev's sufferings made him want to look deeper in it. He picked up his notebooks and began working on the next stage of the plan code named 'afterlife2'.