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

Lights out hadn't been sounded yet, and a few new recruits were still scattered around the parade ground doing extra training, running laps.

Bai Ye was one of them. He wasn't satisfied with the training volume in the recruit company—by the standards of his previous life, his current physical fitness wasn't even enough for a warm-up. So he added a nighttime workout for himself: a five-kilometer run as a base, three sets each of push-ups and sit-ups, and finally an obstacle course. He did this for several nights in a row, rain or shine.

The track on the playground gleamed with a dim yellow light under the streetlights. After finishing his last lap, Bai Ye stopped by the horizontal bar beside the track, bent over, and braced his knees to catch his breath.

He straightened up, preparing to do a few sets of pull-ups on the horizontal bar. He had only taken two steps when a hand reached out from behind, grabbed his wrist, and dragged him into the grove of trees beside the playground.

Bai Ye instinctively sidestepped, absorbed the force, and executed a counter-grab, completing the preparation in a fraction of a second. Then he recognized the hand—long, slender fingers with distinct knuckles, and a small, light-colored mark on the wrist from a bullet casing burn during gun-fighting training. It was Xuan Xiao.

He eased his grip and was pulled by Xuan Xiao to a corner behind the equipment room. This place was sandwiched between a wall and a brick wall, blocked from the wind on two sides. The streetlights couldn't shine in, and only a little of the dim yellow light from the distant playground could be seen, barely enough to make out a person's outline.

Bai Ye looked up at Xuan Xiao, his face expressionless, but his eyes clearly asked: What are you doing?

"What are you striving for by practicing like this every night?" Xuan Xiao asked. His voice wasn't loud, but his tone wasn't his usual lazy one; he asked very seriously.

Bai Ye wiped the sweat from his chin with his sleeve and didn't answer. He turned to walk back to the playground, but Xuan Xiao took half a step forward, stretched out his arm, and braced himself against the wall, blocking his way.

"I'm asking you a question."

Bai Ye glanced at him sideways. Xuan Xiao was half a head taller than him, and in this cramped corner, the distance between the two was compressed to an abnormally small range. But Bai Ye didn't feel anything special about this distance; he had shared a foxhole with his comrades countless times in his previous life.

"I want to find my brother," he said. His voice was soft and flat, as if he were stating something obvious.

Xuan Xiao lowered his arm from the wall. He was silent for two seconds. He knew Bai Ye's brother was missing, and that Bai Ye had joined the army to find him. But looking at Bai Ye's face, which appeared even smaller in the dim light, and at his thin wrist that he had gripped, his brows furrowed.

"You?" Xuan Xiao's voice carried its usual smug tone, but there was something else beneath it. "With your skinny arms and legs, you'd be the first one to die on the battlefield."

Bai Ye frowned slightly. He could ignore what others said about him, but he objected to the description of "thin arms and thin legs".

No one had ever used those four words to describe him in his previous life. He was 007, a living legend in the mercenary world, capable of wiping out an entire outpost single-handedly and taking down an entire patrol with a single knife. Although he was indeed thinner than in his previous life, he wasn't exactly described as having "thin arms and thin legs."

"I'm not skinny." His tone was a little colder than before.

Xuan Xiao leaned against the wall, crossed his arms and looked at him with his head tilted. Xuan Xiao just likes to see Bai Ye looking unhappy - Bai Ye's usually expressionless face makes people always want to carve some cracks in it. He laughed, deliberately making his tone sound more harsh.

"Who would believe that? I could grab your wrist and there would still be two fingers left unattached. And you call that not thin enough?"

Bai Ye stared at him for two seconds.

Then he reached out and grabbed Xuanxiao's wrist.

Before Xuanxiao could react, Baiye had already pulled his hand over and pressed it against her abdomen.

Xuanxiao's palm touched the small patch of skin exposed at the hem of Baiye's clothes.

One, two, three, four, five, six—six abdominal muscles, each one subtly embedded under the skin, neither exaggerated nor ostentatious, yet each one is distinctly present to the touch.

Bai Ye was slender with a small frame, and when dressed, he looked like an ordinary, thin young man. But when he took off his clothes, his thin but firm muscles covered his narrow frame, like a dagger hidden in its sheath—unsharp, but you knew it could pierce things when you held it.

"Six pieces." Bai Ye's voice came from above, devoid of any emotion. "You touched it?"

Xuanxiao's brain experienced a complete system crash in that instant.

"You..." Xuanxiao's vocal cords produced a single syllable, and the rest of the words were stuck in his throat.

His brain failed to reboot. His senses of sight, hearing, and touch were all jumbled together in that instant, steam billowing from the pot and pouring into the back of his ears. He jerked his hand back, the force of which felt like touching a red-hot iron, and his back slammed against the brick wall behind him.

The light in the corner was dim, making it impossible to see the color of his face. But his ears were already bright red, so red they could almost glow in the darkness, spreading all the way down to his neck, and up to the small section of his collarbone that his collar couldn't cover.

He put his hand behind his back, his fingers clenched into a fist, the feeling of Bai Ye's abdominal skin still lingering in his palm—that thin, firm, warm muscle.

Bai Ye withdrew his hand and looked at Xuan Xiao, who was pressed against the wall as if he had seen a ghost, not understanding what had happened.

He was just letting the other person confirm the existence of his abs. What did that reaction mean? In his previous life in the mercenary group, it was perfectly normal for men to check each other's training results. They would take off their shirts and compare whose core muscles were stronger, and after the competition, they could put their arms around each other's shoulders and go for a drink.

He didn't intend to spend too much brainpower on this, rolled his eyes, turned around and walked towards the playground, ready to complete today's pull-up target.

He had only taken three steps when a hand reached out from behind and grabbed his wrist.

This is the second time tonight. Bai Ye took a deep breath and patiently turned around.

"What now—"

He hadn't finished speaking.

Xuanxiao took a half step back as he grabbed his wrist, as if he wanted to say something, but he didn't see the protruding tree roots on the ground. The roots of the old locust tree had pushed their way out of the soil, curving into a low arc in the shadows where the streetlights couldn't reach.

Xuan Xiao's heel slammed hard against the ground, causing him to lose his balance instantly. He instinctively tugged at Bai Ye's hand, falling towards her.

Bai Ye was pulled so hard that she lost her balance and reached out to brace herself on his shoulder. But Xuan Xiao fell too fast—he was like a wall that had been pushed down, reeking of a mixture of soap and laundry detergent, and he crashed straight down on Bai Ye.

"You—" Bai Ye only said one word.

Then both of them fell down.