Chapter 16 — Changed the entire Inheritance Lineage to Choose the Wolf King

It took Thiet Phong three days to find a way to contact Dinh Thi Le safely enough without making anyone suspicious. In the end, he chose to pretend to ask his nanny to sew an old cloak - a normal job she had always done for the whole family, no one paid attention.

"Nanny," he whispered when the two of them were alone in the small kitchen, his hand pretending to point to the thread that needed to be repaired on his robe, "I need your help with something important, and extremely dangerous."

Dinh Thi Le, even though she is old, is still sharp enough to recognize the urgency in his voice. She didn't ask much, just nodded slightly, her hands continued sewing as if nothing happened.

She had lived in the patriarch's palace long enough to understand that, sometimes, silence and a calm appearance were the best shields from ever-watching eyes. Her fingers, although wrinkled with age, still quickly guided the needle and thread through each line of fabric, without a moment's hesitation, as if she had done this task a thousand times before — which in fact she had.

"You know," she said, her voice still as normal as if she were chatting, "when you were little, you used to sit here and watch me sew, asking me all kinds of things in the world. I asked me why I always had to go through from the bottom up, why not do the opposite. How I answered you, do you still remember?"

Thiet Phong shook his head slightly, not understanding what his nanny was trying to say in such a tense moment.

"My mother said, there are things in life that, no matter how logically you look at them, must be done in a certain order, otherwise, the threads will be messy and the fabric will tear." She looked up at him, her eyes deep and meaningful. "The path you're on now is the same. You have to go step by step, in the right order, don't rush. Otherwise, all the effort you put in will go up in smoke, and maybe even worse than that."

"I understand, nanny," he replied, his voice low. "I will be careful."

“You need to send these pages to Yen Chi in Bach Lang, as soon as possible,” he said, tucking the torn pages from Tieu Yen's notebook into the lining of the cloak, where the newly sewn stitching would hide them perfectly. "I heard that Tieu Yen is planning to harm Yen Chi within the next month - a serious crime that could threaten her life."

Dinh Thi Le's old face turned pale for a moment, but she quickly regained her composure. "I will find a way to leave Yen Chi's falcon here before she left - it is still familiar with the route between the two places. But you must promise me, from now on, you must be more careful. That Tieu Yen is not an ordinary person."

"I promise," Thiet Phong replied, squeezing his nanny's hand. "Thank you, ma'am, for everything you've done for this family."

That night, Dinh Thi Le secretly released the eagle carrying a carefully wrapped cloak and a short letter explaining the situation, sent in the dense darkness of a moonless night.

But what Thiet Phong and Dinh Thi Le didn't know was that Tieu Yen, after weeks of vigilance, had finally discovered the disappearance of several pages from her notebook - a small mistake during a routine check had revealed that fact.

She stood silently in her private room, her hands shaking with anger when she realized someone had broken into her secret vault. After checking all the people who had access to the back garden in recent nights, and recalling Thiet Phong's unusually probing eyes during the conversation a few days ago, she quickly pieced together the culprit.

"Thiet Phong," she hissed through gritted teeth, "you dare betray me."

She sat down, tried to calm down, and thought about her next steps. If Thiet Phong had obtained evidence and was able to send it to Bach Lang, her plan was at risk of being exposed sooner than expected. She needed to act immediately, before any evidence could cause real damage.

She stood up, walked to the large mirror in the room, and looked at her reflection for a long time. Three years ago, when she first set foot in the patriarch's mansion as an orphan that no one cared about, she swore to herself that she would never let anyone look down on her again. She had painstakingly built each piece of this plan for nearly three years — from overhearing how to make Huyen Huong from an old medicine man who was banished by her own clan, to gradually gaining the trust of the entire patriarch's family. She won't let a small mistake like this ruin everything.

"No," she told herself, her voice hard again. "I've come too far to stop now."

The next morning, Tieu Yen came to the patriarch Quach Bach Hai with a perfectly staged worried expression.

"Chief," she said, her voice trembling with conviction, "I've discovered that Thiet Phong has been acting very strangely lately. I'm afraid... I'm afraid he's planning to betray the clan, maybe secretly contacting outside forces to harm his own family."

Quach Bach Hai, whose judgment had been silently influenced by Huong Du Or for many months, making his judgment increasingly vague, frowned worriedly. "Do you have any proof?"

"I saw him sneaking in and out of the back garden at unusually late hours, and recently he seemed very nervous every time I asked him," Tieu Yen said, her voice filled with sincere concern. "I'm just afraid he's doing something dangerous, patriarch. I don't want to see our family encounter any more trouble, after what happened with sister Yen Chi."

The clever mention of "Yen Chi's story" as a heartbreaking precedent reinforced the fear in the patriarch's heart, making him no longer able to think clearly.

"I will have someone monitor Thiet Phong more closely," he decided, his voice filled with fatigue.

That afternoon, while Thiet Phong was at the blacksmith workshop as usual, four guards from the patriarch's palace suddenly appeared, because Tieu Yen himself "discovered" a forged "evidence" - a piece of paper written in Thiet Phong's forged handwriting, hinting at a plot to betray the clan, which Tieu Yen cleverly "found" in his room.

"Guo Thiet Phong," the captain of the soldiers said, his voice serious, "by order of the clan leader, you are being detained for investigation on suspicion of treason."

"What?" Thiet Phong was stunned and dropped the forging hammer he was holding in his hand. "This is a misunderstanding. I have not done anything to betray the clan!"

"We were just following orders," the captain said, his voice somewhat apologetic but still firmly signaling the other guards to come forward.

Thiet Phong stood still, looking into the distance, where he caught a glimpse of Tieu Yen standing and observing from behind a row of trees, the corner of her mouth curled up into a cold smile that only he could recognize the true meaning behind it.

He has been discovered. And now, all hope of stopping Tieu Yen's plot is gradually slipping out of his grasp, right when he has just begun to act.

He did not resist, letting the guards escort him away, with only a faint hope left in his heart - that the cloak and important pages had reached Yen Chi before it was too late.

On the way to be escorted through the front yard, he glanced towards the four younger siblings' suite of rooms and saw Second Brother standing in the doorway, his face filled with confusion, not understanding what was going on. Thiet Phong nodded slightly at his brother, a small gesture of reassurance, even though he himself was not sure where things would go.

He was taken to a small room in the government's prison complex — not an official prison cell for serious criminals, but a simple detention room, with only a hard wooden bed and a small window with iron bars. The door slammed shut behind him, the sound of the lock ringing coldly in the quiet space.

Sitting alone in the dark, Thiet Phong closed his eyes and tried to stay calm. He knew that, even though he was detained, he still had a weapon that Tieu Yen could not take away - the truth had been sent, and as long as it reached the right person, all of her plots would soon be exposed to the light.

Outside the small window with iron bars, the crescent moon still hung quietly in the night sky, just like every night Yen Chi stood to announce her fateful farewell. Thiet Phong looked at that moonlight, silently praying that the little eagle carrying his family's most important secret would safely travel the long way to Moon Shadow City, before the darkness of the conspiracy could swallow up all that was left.