Chapter 11 — The Last Seed Keeper

Three years after Co Diem Ninh's death, Khe Mien stood in the middle of the lowest terraced field of Vom Xanh, looked down at a rice stem she had just pulled up, and felt that everything she had built during thirteen years of apprenticeship suddenly became more fragile than ever.

The roots were dark black, soft, and smelled of rot—unlike any pest she had ever encountered in her entire career, including the most serious cases recorded in Co Diem Ninh's records during her forty years of work. In the report she would draft tonight, she knew she would have to give it an official name, so that both the Council and all the technical teams involved could call it one thing instead of giving it a lengthy description each time it was mentioned: Root Rot.

"How many products are affected?" she asked, trying to keep her voice calm, even though a worry began to arise in her heart that she had never experienced with such intensity.

"Seventeen rows in this area," replied Ve Diem Quynh, a young technician who had just been temporarily assigned from the maintenance team to assist Khe Mien in checking the scene, still holding the soil pH measuring device. "But I think we only counted the area near the pipeline from the Respiratory Station. Ms. Dieu Lam reported that there were similar signs in the western greenhouse area as well."

Khe Mien closed her eyes for a second, trying to organize her thoughts. In the past three years, since she officially took charge of the Grain Warehouse alone, she had faced many difficulties - a short drought season that caused a slight decrease in output, another wave of pests similar to what she had dealt with Co Diem Ninh - but she had never encountered anything of this scale and spreading speed.

She thought back to the rows of yellow rice she'd seen on the night of the funeral three years ago, the small sign she'd intended to check "tomorrow" but then got caught up in the urgent tasks of taking over the Grain Warehouse all by herself, and gradually, like all other "later" things, it sank into oblivion amid countless other tasks. She tested it, yes — but then the signature was too small, too vague to distinguish from the normal natural fluctuations of a closed agricultural ecosystem. Now, standing in front of a series of rotting rice stumps spread out over a wide area, she couldn't help but wonder if it was the same problem, just one that had been smoldering for three years without anyone noticing.

“I need to take soil samples from all the affected areas,” she said, her voice regaining the certainty of a leader, even though inside she was still confused. "And you need to see my father today. If this disease started in the area near the Respiratory Station pipes, there may be a connection."

Ve Diem Quynh nodded and immediately started taking samples, while Khe Mien walked quickly towards the central technical area, where her father — still the chief engineer of the Respiratory Station after all these years, although his hair was now much whiter than what Khe Mien remembered him as a child — was supervising a routine maintenance shift.

"Father," she called, her voice urgent enough for him to stop what he was doing.

Vu Dinh Khoat looked at his daughter's face and immediately realized that something serious was happening. "What's going on?"

"Root rot. Widespread, at least seventeen rows in the lower fields, maybe more than in the western greenhouse. I think it has something to do with your system."

Vu Dinh Khoat's face turned pale for a moment, and Khe Mien realized, if only for a brief second, something like fear that he had not let her see so clearly since her mother's death.

"You said the area near the pipeline?" he asked, his voice lowered, more cautious.

"That's right."

He didn't say anything more right away, just motioned for her to follow him to the central control room of the Respiratory Station, where a row of screens displayed the operating indicators of the entire air filtration and water regeneration system. He tapped on the keyboard, bringing up a graph that tracked the performance of filter element number three — the same filter element he had mentioned over breakfast many years ago, when Khe Mien was a nine-year-old child just starting to learn the trade.

“Look here,” he said, pointing to a chart line that has been trending slowly but steadily down over the past few years. "Core number three's filtering performance has dropped nearly twelve percent over the past three years. It's a slow decline, slow enough not to trigger any automatic warnings, but long enough to accumulate into a real problem."

"What does that mean?"

"It means that small, very small, amounts of toxic compounds from air and untreated wastewater are leaking through the system, instead of being completely trapped as originally designed. A small amount that is not enough to directly harm humans through drinking water or breathing air — safety indicators are still within acceptable limits. But the soil..." He paused, as if considering how to phrase the next thing. "Soil accumulates over time, unlike the human body, which can partially eliminate it. If a small amount of the toxin continuously seeped into the soil over the course of three years, it could have accumulated to the point where it began to directly affect plant roots, especially those closest to pipelines."

Khe Mien felt like a heavy rock had just pressed on her chest. "So why didn't anyone discover it sooner? Dad is the chief engineer, he monitors this system every day."

"Because a twelve percent performance reduction is not enough to exceed the system's own safety warning threshold," Vu Dinh Khoat said, his voice carrying an undisguised self-blame. "It was designed to warn when readings exceeded levels that were dangerous to humans, not to the soil — because no one, not even the engineers who built the Respiratory Station nearly a hundred years ago, ever anticipated that one day the system could deteriorate to the point of harming the soil in this way, while remaining safe for humans to breathe and drink. This was a flaw in the design itself, through no fault of anyone's alone."

The two stood silently in the control room for a long moment, the pale blue light from the screens reflecting on both of their tense faces.

"Dad, can you fix filter element number three?" Khe Mien asked finally.

"It's possible, in theory. But the filter core is a complex component that can't be repaired on-site with materials currently available in Green Dome — we'd need a complete replacement, which the founders of Green Dome almost a hundred years ago would have had on hand as a spare, but that spare stock has been used up from previous repairs over the decades." He sighed, rubbing his hands over his face in a tired gesture that Khe Mien rarely saw in him. "In short, Khe Mien: we no longer have the parts to fix it ourselves. We need to find it elsewhere."

"Sand Dome," Khe Mien said immediately, recalling the periodic exchanges of goods between Green Dome and Desert Dome, which specialized in making glass and solar equipment. "They make filtration equipment, right? Maybe they have compatible parts, or at least can make them."

“Maybe,” her father replied, but his voice didn't carry much hope. "But it's a long journey, past the Ashes, and we haven't sent a large party that far in many years. The Council will have to think very carefully before deciding anything."

Khe Mien looked out the small window of the control room, where she could see a corner of the terraced fields in the distance, which now held a more fragile beauty to her than ever — no longer a stable, eternal scene like she had thought of as a child, but a delicately balanced system that could collapse because of just one small mistake accumulated over many years without anyone noticing.

She thought of Co Diem Ninh's words, three years ago, about the danger of closure, about how a community that never looked outside itself will never know when what it had was no longer enough. She thought of the Mist Dome, of the cautionary tale she had heard since she was nine years old about a system that gradually failed until it could no longer be repaired.

“I will report this to the Council today,” she said, her voice regaining determination. "We don't have time to wait any longer."

That evening, while drafting an urgent report to the Arch Council, Khe Mien wrote in her notebook, for the first time in a long time, a line filled with insecurity that she did not try to hide:

*Perhaps the yellow row of rice three years ago is not as trivial as you thought. I learned from Ms. Diem Ninh that you should not ignore small signs. But I skipped it, amidst so many other things to do. Now you must correct the consequences of the lesson that you have not fully followed.*