"Surely he'll have left any trail, though? How else would he have found her before anyone else if it wasn't him?"

"That's what we're hoping to find but I'm a lot less confident now. It's easy to prove he was the one who found the assassin but everything else..."

"You've got leads?"

He presses the heels of his hands into his eyeballs. "No! That monster is going to fucking get away with it!!!!"

"...hey you don't really think..."

"I don't knoooooooooooooooooooooow," he wails.

"I don't know. Now he's just going to, to claim it was Nightmare messing with him all along or some shit, even though that makes no sense unless he was actively refusing to shield himself for some goddamn reason."

"Oppa..."

Si-yeon wipes his eyes with the back of his hand. "Look at me go, breaking down because of this when Tae-gun had to endure it for years." He slaps his face a few times. "No. We'll figure this out. We're getting this guy behind bars come hell or high water. He's in custody right now, that's, like, half the battle already."

"...that was a quick turnover."

"I'm too pretty to be upset for very long." He fills his shot glass with soju and drinks more. "And I've got a meeting in an hour with someone who's going to help me and I should not ruin my makeup."

"You wear makeup?"

"Duh. Gotta accentuate my assets."

"How have I known you for almost a decade and never been told this?"

"That's entirely on you, noona."

"Who are you having a meeting with?"

"That is, unfortunately, confidential, and also doesn't matter. It'll work out. I know it will."

Jaeha was eventually informed that he'd been left alone to guarantee that he was not still under any hostile effects and not because they wanted him to suffer for his sins. He is not as far as he's aware under any hostile effects other than the compulsion not to bite his own tongue off, and once he's no longer being IV fed most of the restraints come off except for the cuffs tying him to the bed. Since he understands incentives and any other suicide attempt would not only fail but also get him restrained again, he doesn't try to do anything crazy anymore. 

There's a TV, and he has access to some books, but not to the internet or the news, so in addition to acutely miserable he's also bored.

He is visited soon enough by a woman in a pencil skirt and professional blouse.

"Kang Jaeha-nim? I'm Kim Su-bin, I'm here to help advocate for you on behalf of Lucid. First of all, I'd like to apologize for your treatment so far. It was largely out of our hands and we've made numerous complaints already. You should have been treated with kindness and respect instead of suspicion, instead of used as a test subject for a rival guild's pet project, and certainly not given solitary confinement for such an abominably long time. I hope these amenities have helped put you at ease. Is there anything I can do to make your stay more comfortable?"

Kill me. 

He doesn't say that, because he, again, understands incentives. He'll leave it for later. "I feel very honoured to have been used as a test subject for said project and my only regret is that this wasn't available as an option seven years ago. My life would be much different nowadays if I had had it.

"Under the circumstances it is unfortunately impossible to make me any more comfortable without sacrificing some other things I believe Lucid to care about, though."

... What?? This is not the way she was expecting this to go.

"In... what way do you mean?"

"Why don't we start by you telling me what your goal would be, here?" he counters with the kind of mildly interested tone of voice that would be paired with folding his fingers and leaning forward on a desk, were he able to do that.

"I'm here to help smooth over this incident and get you the help you need, so you can live a long and fulfilling life, Kang Jaeha-nim," she says, with all of the impassioned inflection of a seasoned bureaucrat. Which is to say: none.

"What does 'smoothing over this incident' entail, exactly? What would the end result have to look like, for you to consider it to have been 'smoothed over'?"

"... We'd like to avoid you ending up in prison, or a psychiatric ward," she says flatly, after a pained pause for the realization that he's not going to be cooperative.