Apocalypse: Transmigrated with an Overlord System
Chapter 126: Not Strength, But Connection

Chapter 126: Chapter 126: Not Strength, But Connection

Liora didn’t know how long she had been reading. Her hands had stopped trembling somewhere along the way, but now her fingertips felt cold. A strange feeling had started to grow in her chest, a tight heaviness that wouldn’t go away no matter how deep she breathed.

"Now I hold over fifty."

Fifty souls. Souls of real people. People who once lived and breathed. People who were still conscious inside him, speaking to him through that strange place he called the soul realm.

She gently closed the book and held it against her lap. Her thoughts were spinning faster than she could follow. Her breath was uneven, and her chest felt too tight.

That man... He had struggled just to hold three at first. He had bled. He had screamed. He had lost control again and again. But Liora... she had never experienced that. There was no pain. No backlash. No soul talking back to her.

She looked down at her own hands. They weren’t trembling anymore, but they didn’t feel like hers either. They looked normal, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that something had changed deep inside her.

Her ability had awakened so suddenly. She hadn’t even realized what she had done. The first soul she absorbed had been from a mutated insect, and back then, she hadn’t known what she was looking at. She only saw flickering flames deep inside those creatures—wild, dark, and angry.

The souls of her friends... they had felt different. Brighter. Warmer. Full of quiet hope and peace, like sunlight behind a veil. But the others—the monsters—they had nothing but hunger left in them.

Some flames were dim. Some were violent. All of them were black. Like ash that had forgotten how to burn. Some of those flames had even started to form beast-like shapes. Grotesque shadows of what they used to be.

And she had taken them in. Again and again. Without even knowing how many. A hundred? Maybe more?

She couldn’t remember.

Liora pressed a hand to her chest and waited. Waited for a whisper. A tug. Some feeling that wasn’t her own. But she felt nothing. Just silence. Just hunger.

Something inside her was always hungry now. Always waiting. Always wanting. It quieted only when she fed. When she took another soul and absorbed it into herself. The more she took, the stronger it got. The harder it became to stop.

She remembered the first time she lost control. She hadn’t known why. Her emotions had vanished, and all that remained was the urge to kill. Now it all made sense.

Those weren’t just corrupted souls. They were changing her too.

She wasn’t like the man in the diary. He held onto real souls. People with regrets. With pain. With voices. But she had only gathered broken things. Shattered memories. Beasts who had forgotten how to think.

Maybe that was why she could hold so many. Because they weren’t really people anymore. They didn’t resist.

But that didn’t make it right.

The book had warned her. About taking the wrong soul. About being consumed from the inside. She hadn’t listened. She hadn’t even known. She had just taken what was there.

And now...

She didn’t even know how much of her was still Liora.

Her throat burned. She wanted to believe she was still herself. That she still had control. That her soul hadn’t been eaten by the very things she killed. But what if she was wrong?

What if that girl—Liora—was already gone?

And what if the only reason she didn’t notice... was because she stopped looking?

Her body shook. Her eyes stung.

She pressed her hands to her head and squeezed her eyes shut.

"No... I’m still me." She muttered through clenched teeth. "I haven’t been corrupted."

She opened her eyes, a hard glint in them.

Their powers were the same, but their worlds were different. He lived among humans. Among souls that still had names and memories and feelings. But she lived in a ruined world. A broken apocalypse. Where real human souls were rare, and even if they were around, she couldn’t bring herself to take them.

She only had one choice. These corrupted souls, these beasts, and these zombies.

But from now on, she wasn’t going to let them control her. She wasn’t going to let them twist her.

"I am their master," she whispered. "They will obey me. Whether they want to or not."

She would find a way to purify them. She would tear out the darkness from inside them if she had to. And the only thing they would know... was to serve her.

Her emotions slowly calmed. Her hands relaxed. A new light sparked in her eyes.

When she finally looked at the book again, her fingers no longer hesitated. She turned the page.

The next Chapter was titled: "How I Called Them."

Liora sat up straighter and scanned the paragraphs.

At first, it only described his failures. How the souls would appear randomly during danger. How they ignored him. How he couldn’t control who came or when.

And then, she found it.

A single line.

"I couldn’t call them until I gave them a reason to answer."

Her heart skipped a beat.

Liora’s eyes moved to the next passage. The page was unevenly inked, like the writer had paused often, maybe even afraid.

"I tried names. I tried begging. I even tried blood."

"None of it worked."

Liora leaned in closer. Her heartbeat quickened.

"Then one night, while I was half-asleep, I heard a voice, not outside, but inside. It didn’t speak in words. It was like a breath brushing against the back of my mind. Familiar but not mine."

"And suddenly I realized... I didn’t need to speak at all."

Liora frowned slightly. No commands? No chants?

"They weren’t waiting to be ordered."

"They were waiting to be remembered."

That made her pause. She could not help but contemplate this approach, confusion clouding her mind as she wondered whether it would even work