I'd Recognize You Even If You Were Reduced to Ashes

Waves of heat rolled over the afternoon field as the sweltering sun shined down at the bare land. The soldiers encircled them in rows.

It was the first time Lian Qing had heard a test before one could join the Special Command Unit. He couldn't help but worry about their fragile and petite Comrade Xiao.

Xiao Jing stood in the middle of the crowd, on the receiving end of many sympathetic gazes. Surely he wouldn't beat her to death?

As usual, Shen Chengfeng made a grand entrance, still covered from head to toe like a rice dumpling. Not only was he the current Commander of the Special Command Unit, but he was also unbelievably formidable and skilled. It was no surprise that his appearance silenced the entire arena. In awe, none of the soldiers dared speak a word.

"Can you guess why I'm here?" Shen Chengfeng asked.

Xiao Jing stared at him and saw her figure reflected in his sunglasses. The more she looked at it, the more she felt that her face looked unsure.

Shen Chengfeng circled Xiao Jing twice. Xiao Jing made sure that she was standing tall, giving off an aura of being unfazed by his presence. It was almost as if someone had frozen her in place. If not for the strands of hair moving subtly with the wind, he would have thought that the soldier in front of him was a sculpture and not flesh and blood.

Xiao Jing swallowed her saliva, unable to guess what he planned to do by examining her in such a manner. She could feel her blood rising. If the stalemate continued, she would soon pass out from the crushing pressure if she were lucky to escape a heatstroke.

"Just so that people would not see this as me bullying the weak, I will give you a chance—a hundred pull-ups. Do you dare to do it?"

"What?" Xiao Jing asked before she could stop herself, thinking that she might have heard wrong.

Shen Chengfeng stopped and took off his sunglasses, his deep eyes as frigid as a world of ice and snow. It extinguished the passionate, searing heat of the mid-July sun. Eerie gusts of wind suddenly picked up, kicking up dust and shrouding the skies.

Shen Chengfeng raised his hand and pointed at the horizontal pull-up bar. "You may begin."

Xiao Jing kept looking back at Shen Chengfeng as she walked to the horizontal bar. That easy?

Shen Chengfeng straightened himself calmly as he glanced at Xiao Jing, who quickly grabbed onto the bar but soon lost energy after two pull-ups. He then beckoned at Lian Qing.

Lian Qing hurriedly went over to Shen Chengfeng, awaiting the orders of his superior officer.

Shen Chengfeng's voice was as cold and unfeeling as ever, "You are to supervise him. A hundred pull-ups."

Lian Qing's lips twitched as he heard the words. Forget about a hundred; recruits of their regiment would be panting for their lives after twenty pull-ups. It would kill Xiao Jing!

Xiao Jing hung by the bar as she began to see stars. She felt that she could not hang on any longer.

"An additional ten pull-ups whenever you fall off the bar. You are not allowed to stop until you've completed the full set." The man's voice, cold and stern, resounded clearly throughout the entire field.

Xiao Jing grabbed onto the horizontal bar with all her strength, afraid that she might fall off with just a sway of her body.

Lian Qing stood under the pull-up bar, powerless to help. "Xiao-xiao, you must hang in there. Once you made it through, you could enter the Special Command Unit gloriously! You have to know that the Special Command Unit is a force full of hidden, unnoticed masters. Others would be rejected at the door even if they did a thousand pull-ups. All you need to do now is a hundred!"

Xiao Jing's arms began to tremble as she glanced at Lian Qing, who was still making insensitive remarks. "Would you like to come up here, Sir?" Xiao Jing thought. "I would hold your shoes for you if you could do ten!"

"This seems to be against the rules, Commander." Mu Xichi whispered from behind Shen Chengfeng.

Shen Chengfeng gave him a cold side glance as he said cooly, "Rules? Are there rules on my team?"

Mu Xichi shut up immediately. Indeed, the only rule in Shen Chengfeng's Steel Eagle Team was to follow orders without question.

"Keep your eyes on them. One too few pull-ups and they'll be punished with a hundred more."

Mu Xichi frowned slightly. No matter how he looked at it, it seemed as though his Captain was trying to make things difficult for Lieutenant Xiao.

Even if he could complete a hundred pull-ups, he would be half dead after he finished them.

The sun continued to grill the land ferociously. Xiao Jing hung on the pull-up bar, her lips all cracked and dry. More than once, her arms trembled, which soon spread to spasms running through her entire body. She almost lost sense of her breathing. Every time she inhaled, her lungs burned like a ball of fire. It scorched her organs until even her heart and liver began to hurt.

"Xiao Jing, we're down to the last fifty. You can't give up now!" Lian Qing yelled under the pull-up bar.

Xiao Jing's vision began to blur; her ears had automatically blocked out all sounds around her, and the only things she could still hear were her laborious breaths. Every single intake of air was torture.

"Xiao Jing, I heard that your fifth brother, Xiao Ye, was just promoted by exception, making him the youngest General of the Empire." Mother's words rung by Xiao Jing's ears, repeating itself like a curse.

"Mother doesn't expect you to achieve great honor. Even if you become the useless one of the Xiao family, you must remember. Five years will be over before you know it. Once you retire from the military, I'll take you out of the Capital City. So long as you can be alive and well, being looked down upon doesn't matter."

She was the useless bum of the Xiaos. She had become the joke of the entire Xiao family, the one abandoned by the Xiao clan as a whole.

No, she would not take it lying down. So what if she, Xiao Jing, was a woman? Why was she a notch lower than everyone else? She couldn't admit it. She would never admit it!

Lian Qing's eyes widened in disbelief. What's going on with Xiao Jing? She looked as though someone had given her a shot of adrenaline? Xiao Jing, who had been at the brink of passing out, was suddenly doing a series of pull-ups with impeccable posture. She completed the last fifty pull-ups in a single go, each pull-up perfectly clean. She was so smooth that it seemed like he could easily do another hundred.

"97, 98, 99, 100!"

The assigned hundred pull-ups were completed, but Xiao Jing had no intention of stopping, not even for a second. She continued to grip the bar tightly, and every time she heaved her chest up towards the bar, sweat would scatter from her forehead. Drop by drop soaked into her shirt until the entire thing was drenched.

"Enough, enough, Xiao Jing. You've done enough." Lian Qing observed that her gaze was numb and unfocused. It was a clear indication that her body was reaching its limit.

"No, it's not enough, far from enough. I can still do more. I can continue. This is not my limit. This isn't enough, not enough at all." As if someone had wound her brain up like clockwork, the gears turned revolution after revolution without rest.

Thud!

Xiao Jing finally fell from the horizontal bar, face-up, on the 203rd pull-up. She laid motionlessly on the ground, her limbs so stiff that they are practically unbendable.

Lian Qing quickly gathered her in his arms and poured a bottle of water on her head. He tapped her unresponsive cheeks as he asked anxiously, "How are you feeling? Do you know who I am?"

Xiao Jing heard his voice, and the mist in her eyes dispersed. Pointing at the face mere centimeters away from her, she said, "I'd recognize you, even if you were just ashes."