With a hideous cracking noise, a shard of crystal bursts through your subject's skull, flying into your waiting hand.

After casting this spell, you must study the target for 3 consecutive rounds, concentrating each round on the effect.

This is treated as concentrating on a spell (PH 176), and if you are interrupted, the spell is lost.

Once the study is complete, the target's current surface thoughts (as detect thoughts) congeal into a solid shard of crystal.

This crystal then erupts from the target's head (dealing 2d8 points of damage and 2 points of Intelligence damage) and flies to your hand.

Once you have the crystal, you (and only you) can use a full-round action to look into it and view the memories it contains.

The crystal remains for 24 hours or until the memories have been viewed once.