AN HONEST MISTAKE

After his vision went dark, Aidan felt like he had fallen into a deep slumber. He didn't have any perception of the time he was out. Then he was woken by muffled sounds of struggle. Opening his eyes, he saw a blurred image of a back alley, with the evening sunlight casting an orange light across the brick walls of the buildings. The sound became clearer: "How many times do I have to tell you? You pay me the first day of the month. Don't whine like a bitch and pay the goddamn money or next time you will need a wheelchair to go to college." He felt like waking up in the backseat of a car while somebody else drove.

Then his sight cleared and what he saw confused him, he was holding someone by his collar, and he recognized him instantly. Still, it also confused him, he was holding himself against a brick wall, his younger self to be precise, when he fell out of control Aidan forced his soul to wake up completely, stumbling back and falling back. 

As he was recovering from the daze, he saw himself run away from the alley "What the hell is going on?" Aidan thought at the weird event that he just witnessed, something felt wrong about it, he was taller than he was before the regression, which was impossible since he had been 1.71 m tall since he was 15, even after allocating stat points in his system nothing changed his height, and now he felt a little bigger 1.8 m at least. 

"Are you kidding me?" Aidan exclaimed as he pulled out his phone and saw Liam Black's face staring back at him. This guy used to extort money from Aidan for "protection" back in college, and it was time to end it.

As Aidan was lost in thought sitting on the alley's floor a pair of thugs appeared from the corner, one of them was a bulky bald man, and the other one was a skinny guy with tattoos all over his body.

"Hey Liam are you done here" the skinny guy said.

"Yeah, we saw the little shit running away," the bald man said looking behind his back.

"Anyway...report back to the boss with the money, you know what happens when he doesn't get the monthly cut the first day"

Aidan nodded and got out of the alley "I'll go see him later, I still have something to do" he said walking away from them, before he tried to do anything he needed to get his grip on his new way of using his powers, the mana was still there in his soul he just have to find the way to access it without the easy mode the system provided.

It was starting to rain, he couldn't go to his home since he wasn't him technically, so he ended up beneath a bridge. he sat up in the dirt letting out a heavy sigh.

After 20 minutes of meditation, he started to feel a tingle across his limbs, like a thousand ants walking through his veins, the will of the monster souls he still had with him synchronizing with his own.

Then like before, in his chest, a nasty, toothy maw opened, it was an odd feeling, he introduced one of his hands inside of it out of curiosity, and at the very least it didn't have a weird tongue inside, instead what he found inside shocked him, the souls of the Monsters he had absorbed in his past life with his Devourer skills were there, at least some of them, he had lost most of the souls he had devoured in his previous life but he kept the soul of a Iron Fur Wolf and... the Soul fragment of Seraphel.

Seraphel was a huge cosmic dragon, larger than a planet, with moons orbiting around it. Aidan obtained a soul fragment after the Astralis Empire sent a team of its best hunters to gather rare materials that grew in the dragon. Aidan managed to consume a core from one of its moons before witnessing the high-class hunters being decimated by the dragon.

He didn't dare to try and prove the soul fragment, fearing he would set its attention towards him and the earth.

As he finished his meditation, he sensed a much smaller soul inside his body, which belonged to the original owner, Liam Black. Lacking empathy for the former owner, he decided to absorb his soul completely, extracting important information before it was gone, after all this guy was a piece of shit that nobody would miss.

But he had to be that piece of shit from now on.