Rebirth of a Mercenary: The Ace Mercenary Forced to Be the Beloved of the Group

Three more days have passed.

Bai Ye felt like he was going to die. This wasn't a metaphor, nor an exaggeration, but literally—he felt his life slowly slipping away from his extremities, like sand in an hourglass slowly and irreversibly draining to the bottom.

He huddled in the corner, his body burning hot yet freezing cold, his skin covered in a sticky layer of cold sweat, yet his temperature felt like a smoldering fire burning from within.

His lips were so chapped that each breath tore open new cracks, from which pale red blood seeped, which he then licked away, a numb, mechanical repetition.

He couldn't remember how long it had been since he last drank water, or perhaps his memory had simply gone blank. Time had become a muddy, viscous, boundless chaos for him, as if day and night were mixed together. He couldn't tell when he was awake, when he was unconscious, or when he woke up again.

He leaned against the wall, his head tilted to one side, the light in his vision turning gray and blurry, as if a layer of fog was slowly covering his eyes from the outside.

He could feel his heartbeat slowing down, as if an invisible hand was slowly loosening the thread that kept his body running.

His consciousness floated and sank in a state of chaos. Sometimes he felt himself falling, plummeting into a bottomless abyss, and other times he felt himself floating upwards, drifting towards a white, blurry light. He didn't know which was real, or perhaps neither.

Just then, the door to the water dungeon was pushed open.

The sound of the door hinges turning was exceptionally clear in the empty space, like a cold needle piercing his hazy senses. Footsteps descended the steps, each step following the same steady rhythm. That familiar, unhurried force made his nerves, which had been burning with pain, tremble slightly in this chaos.

The boots stopped in front of Bai Ye.

It took Bai Ye a lot of effort to lift her head slightly.

His neck muscles seemed to have been unused for a long time. Every tiny movement would aggravate the old wounds on the side of his neck and the wounds torn open by the whipping on his back, causing him to break out in a cold sweat.

He moved his lips, and a dry, almost inaudible syllable escaped his throat: "...Scorpion..."

The scorpion crouched down.

He held an enamel mug in his hand, from which steam rose slightly. The warm steam condensed into a thin white line in the cold air, like something soft that he hadn't seen in a long time.

He brought the rim of the jar to Bai Ye's mouth, supporting the back of his head with one hand to prevent it from drooping.

Warm water flowed down Bai Ye's chapped lips and down his parched throat.

Bai Ye swallowed almost instinctively; the warm water flow was like a thin thread, slightly bringing his wandering consciousness back.

He panted for a while after drinking the water, his chest rising and falling slightly.

He could finally see Scorpion's face clearly—those eyes no longer held the undisguised disgust of the last time, nor anything else he could understand; only a deep, unfathomable complexity.

He didn't know why the scorpion had come, nor what it wanted. He only felt that the person in front of him was the only thing he could still see clearly in this chaos, like a rope handed to him in the storm. He didn't know if he was grasping a lifeline or another chain, but he no longer had the strength to tell.

The scorpion placed the enamel mug on the ground next to it, and the bottom of the mug hit the cement floor with a crisp sound.

He pulled a small glass bottle from his pocket. The bottle was only the size of a thumb and contained a dark brown liquid that gleamed with an oily sheen in the dim light, like some kind of concentrated essence.

"This drug I have is more potent than anything Viper has," Scorpion said, his voice low, so low that only the two of them could hear, as if afraid of being overheard. "After you take it, you won't experience any withdrawal symptoms for two days. You'll feel like all the symptoms have disappeared, as if you've never touched those things. Your body will temporarily return to a relatively normal state; you can walk again, think again, and see things clearly again."

He paused, his gaze falling on Bai Ye's cloudy eyes, and slowed his speech, as if to make sure he could hear every word that followed: "But in two days, the withdrawal symptoms will come back like a tidal wave. Ten times worse than now. Your body is already pushed to its limit, and with the addiction and the backlash from this drug, you might not make it through."

Bai Ye's eyes flickered. He looked at the medicine, then at Scorpion's face: "...Will I die?"

The scorpion didn't look away: "Maybe."

Bai Ye was silent for a few seconds. Then he spoke, his voice slightly louder than before, as if he were using the last of his strength to say it: "...Fight."

Scorpion frowned. His brow furrowed slightly, as if he wanted to say something, or perhaps he was waiting for Bai Ye to reconsider. He opened his mouth, his voice unusually hesitant, as if he had carefully chosen the right words: "You—"

"I don't care what the price is," Bai Ye interrupted him. "I just want... Viper's life."

The scorpion did not speak.

He was silent for a moment, then he unscrewed the cap, and a very subtle, peculiar smell, like herbs mixed with some kind of chemical agent, spread in the air.

He filled the syringe with the dark brown liquid, which gleamed oily in the dim light, like a small clump of concentrated night.

He straightened Bai Ye's arm, found a usable vein on the inside of his elbow, pressed it with his thumb to confirm the location of the vein, and then inserted the needle into the skin.

When the medicine entered his bloodstream, Bai Ye felt no pain. He only felt a very faint warm current slowly spreading from his arm, as if a hand was scooping his consciousness up from the bottom of the sea.

The warm current was very light, as light as a breeze passing through the hall, but wherever it passed, the spasms that were tearing him apart were receding, the burning sensation that was scalding him was cooling down, and the suffocating feeling that was pressing on his chest was easing.

He opened his mouth, as if to say something.

But his consciousness completely snapped at that moment.

He felt his body being supported by something warm and soft. The last thing he could make out was that the back of his head was cushioned by a palm, preventing it from hitting the cold ground directly.

Then he knew nothing more, his whole being sinking into that painless darkness, like a leaf finally falling to the bottom of the water, settling down quietly in the current.