Chapter One: The Awakening

When I opened my eyes, I realized that I was no longer in the place I remembered being the night before. I felt weak, as if I hadn't eaten or slept well in the past three months, which reminded me of the worst time of my life.

The darkness I saw when I opened my eyes was overwhelming. For a second, I thought I had gone blind, which scared me a lot, since my job as a programmer depends on my vision. My conscious mind calculated the consequences of this terrible possibility, while my subconscious mind searched for something that could disprove it. In the midst of this desperate search, I tried to move my hands in front of my eyes, which debunked my initial theory, as I could see them, but only succeeded in frightening me more. I saw a dirty and apparently malnourished hand, with a size smaller than an adult's hand, which made me think that something strange was happening.

[Have I been kidnapped?] I knew this was nonsense, as I had no money or family that could be extorted since "that" incident. I quickly managed to calm my emotions because if there is anything I excel at, it is the ability to control them, although in this situation it was proving quite difficult.

After much thinking, the only answer I found was that I had reincarnated, or rather, had gone back in time to when I was about eight or nine years old. I deduced this from the darkness that surrounded me, which I had only seen in such a quantity in Malawi. In addition, the size of my hands and the general feeling of discomfort made me think that I had returned to the darkest time in my life, my time in Malawi.

< +2 football IQ and + 1 in mindset>

"Haha..." I began to laugh weakly when I realized what was happening and the implications of the fact that the word "football IQ" appeared in the notification. But before celebrating anything, I wanted to confirm my thoughts, so I took a breath and said in my head the same thing that so many protagonists of novels I had read thought before: [status]

FOOTBALL SYSTEM

SYSTEM LEVEL: 1 (required to evolve: ???)

USER: Alex Webara

AGE: 8 years and 3 months

POTENTIAL: Grade E

EXP: 0

SKILL POINTS: 0

STATISTICS (click for more info)

MISSIONS (click for more info)

SHOP (click for more info)

(Upgrade the system to unlock more functions)

When I finished reading the status screen, I couldn't stop my tears, remembering which was the frustrated dream of my previous life.