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.