Don't Pick Up Stray Puppies

As an S-rank Guide admired by everyone, Jiang Yu was unstoppable in Sentinel-Guide competitions. At a young age, she became a squad leader and led her team into contaminated zones to clear out mutants.

Her life had seemed full of possibilities, but an accident cost her her spirit companion and badly injured her right leg, causing her mental power to plummet to C-rank.

To the famous Jiang family of the Safe Zone, a low-rank Guide had no value at all.

Before she had even recovered, Jiang Yu received an official transfer order in her hospital bed. Under the pretext of sending her out for practical training, her elders expelled her from the Safe Zone, treating her like useless scrap.

She wandered the A-273 contaminated zone for months, braving the elements, until she finally stopped outside a shelter.

A year later, the shelter director died at the hands of mutants while protecting everyone. With her dying breath, she entrusted the entire shelter to Jiang Yu, the oldest person there.

And so Jiang Yu shouldered the shelter alone.

Supplies were scarce. She led a group of children from hiding place to hiding place in the contaminated zone, waking before dawn and going to bed long after dark just to scrape by. Making money was out of the question.

After forcing herself to carry on for a year, Jiang Yu was truly exhausted.

At three in the morning, she steeled herself and left the shelter. She had barely gone a few steps when a gray puppy with big, blinking eyes deliberately got in her way.

Jiang Yu snapped, "Stay away from me."

The puppy couldn't understand her. It kept whining in a high-pitched voice, rubbing against Jiang Yu's shoes and rolling around to look cute.

Jiang Yu warned it a second time: "Get lost. Stop bothering me."

The puppy's eyes darted around. It caught the hem of Jiang Yu's trousers in its teeth and tugged her over to a huge trash bin.

A badly wounded Sentinel was leaning against it, covered in blood. She looked just like Jiang Yu had when she first arrived in the contaminated zone two years earlier.

But even so...

What does that have to do with me? Jiang Yu thought.

She took off, ready to be a vicious woman who left someone to die.

But five seconds later, she turned around, rolled her eyes, muttered curses, and carried the woman back to the shelter.

Jiang Yu dumped the Sentinel onto her own bed and gave the unconscious woman a harsh warning:

"Now that you're in the shelter and I've saved you, you'll have to be the director with me."

"Don't you dare run away."

Three months later, Lu Xiaolang insisted she wanted to return to the A-270 contaminated zone.

Jiang Yu couldn't understand it. She had practically put her heart in Lu Xiaolang's hands, so how could she be so ungrateful?

With a grim face, she pulled a yellowed sheet of scrap paper from a drawer, gripped a pencil stub shorter than her thumb, and carefully worked out the bill for the Sentinel.

Jiang Yu: "You eat sixteen potatoes every day. One potato costs twenty yuan, so that's 320 yuan a day. You've been here almost three months. Work out how many potatoes you've eaten and how much you owe me."

Lu Xiaolang's eyes widened. "Isn't that extortion???"

Jiang Yu sneered. "I don't care! You never asked how much the potatoes cost when you were eating them."

She paused, then added, "Besides, you were starving to death back then. Were you really going to worry about whether the potatoes were ridiculously expensive?"

Lu Xiaolang: "..."

Jiang Yu quickly wrote out an IOU and flourished it toward Lu Xiaolang. "Sign it! I've included the medical bills, daily necessities, and all the other odds and ends, too."

"Once you've paid me back, I'll let you go."

* Romance-focused / eight-year age gap / reunited after a breakup / happy ending

* Beautiful, strong, tragic, aloof Guide as the pursued partner x pure-hearted, clingy younger dog-like Sentinel as the pursuer

* Director of a contaminated-zone shelter x S-rank Sentinel picked up by the roadside

* Jiang Yu x Lu Xiaolang (spirit companion: North American gray wolf)

Theme: Uncover the truth behind the incident