Chapter 52 — The Last Seed Keeper

Three days after the reunion, when the group had found a more stable rhythm of movement through the vast Dong Tro region, Khe Mien sat by a small fire in the evening, a notebook open in front of her, trying to write down from memory what she still remembered from Lai Ba Nguyen's documents that had been lost to Han Dinh Sang.

“The symbol has two curved lines embracing a small circle,” she muttered as she wrote, her finger tracing the shape on the page with simple charcoal strokes. "The names of the Domes suspected to be related to Thien Ho — Upper Dome, for sure, and perhaps a few other Domes that Lai Ba Nguyen only mentioned briefly, I can't remember them all."

Bach Lam sat down next to her, looking at the words gradually filling the page with quiet respect. “You remember more than I thought,” he said.

"Not enough," Khe Mien replied, her voice carrying an undisguised regret. "There were details I knew I'd read but couldn't recall exactly — names, specific connections between leading families. I felt like I was holding on to water with my bare hands, losing every drop no matter how hard I tried."

"Then we'll have to find them again, another way," Ngan The Binh said from the other side of the fire, where he was re-examining the wound on his arm in the firelight, manually removing the old bandage to replace it with a cleaner layer of cloth. "Maybe not right now, when our priority is getting supplies and seeds safely back to the Green Dome. But this fact won't go away just because we lose a few pages."

Diem Quynh, sitting and checking the set of replacement parts brought from Vom Cat to make sure they were intact after all that had happened, looked up to contribute, then paused mid-sentence when she suddenly remembered a painful truth. "The original badge we found in Dai Van Cuong's box," she said, her voice dropping, "is also back in Han Dinh Sang's hands."

A short silence reigned, and Khe Mien nodded, confirming the loss once again. "That's right. We have no physical evidence left, only memories, and human memories are always imperfect."

"But the memories of five different people, when put together, are more complete than the memories of one person," Bach Lam said, a realistic idea creeping into his voice. "We should take time every night, on the way home, to remember together and take notes. Each person will remember different details."

Kien, who was sharpening his small knife with a flat stone, looked up with sudden excitement. "I remember Lai Ba Nguyen talking about a list of other locations with the Thien Ho symbol," he said. "He read some names out loud to us, even though I didn't fully understand their meaning at the time."

"That's right," Khe Mien said, her eyes lighting up as she quickly wrote down his suggestion in her notebook. "Do you remember any names?"

Kien frowned, trying to remember, and for the next half hour, the group worked together to piece together fragmentary memories, each person contributing a small detail that the others had forgotten or ignored, gradually reconstructing an incomplete but still valuable version of what they had learned from the old scholar at Vom Cat.

Ngan The Binh, although not as good at memorizing academic details as younger people, contributes his own observations from his years of travel. "I once heard an old merchant talk about a similar place, many years ago," he said slowly, trying to recall a memory dusted with time. "An abandoned tower near the western border, rumored to have been a place where high-ranking officials of a large organization used to rest before the Great Cataclysm. He didn't mention Heavenly Guardian by name, but his description of the remains — walls covered with strange symbols — makes me now wonder if it's the same place."

"Do you remember the exact location?" Khe Mien asked, jotting down every word he said.

"Not exactly," Ngan The Binh admitted, "but I remember he said it was located near a dry river, whose folk name is Xuong River, because the river bed is bare with bone-white rocks in the dry season."

Khe Mien wrote down that name with quiet excitement, feeling like she had just picked up a small piece of the puzzle amid the rubble of what had been lost. “That's a good start,” she said, folding the page carefully as if it were as precious as the seeds in the box she always carried. "Not complete, but a start, and a start is much better than nothing at all."

When that work stopped because fatigue began to take over, Khe Mien closed her notebook and looked around the small fire at the faces that had become more familiar than anything else in her life over the past two months.

“There's something I've been thinking about a lot these past few days,” she said, her voice thoughtful. "Han Dinh Sang was not a bad man the way Confucius Ba Truc was a bad man. He was not cruel because he enjoyed power. He acted out of fear, out of grief, out of a need for a quick answer for the waiting families. That is much scarier than pure cruelty."

"Why so?" Diem Quynh asked.

"Because pure cruelty can be recognized and resisted," Khe Mien replied. "But fear in the guise of responsibility, in the guise of protecting the community, is much easier to spread and accepted. I'm worried that if tensions between the Arches continue to grow due to competition for resources, we will see more and more Han Dinh Sang appear - good people turned by fear into tools of injustice."

Bach Lam looked at her, a deep respect in his eyes. "That's why what you're trying to do — find the truth, instead of just accepting it — is so important," he said. "Not only because truth has value in itself, but because understanding the roots of fear is the only way to stop it from spreading."

The next morning, as the group continued on their way, Ngan The Binh led them on a different route than the one they had used to reach Vom Da, detouring further south to avoid any patrols that might still be searching the area around the base of the mountain.

"It'll take us almost a week longer than the old route," he explained when Kien asked why they weren't taking the most direct route, "but safety is more important than speed, especially after what just happened. I don't want to risk running into anyone from the Stone Arch again the rest of the way."

Diem Quynh, walking next to Khe Mien, asked a question that had been simmering in her mind for the past few days. "Do you think when we get back to the Green Dome, we should tell you everything that happened? Including the accusation, and the loss of documents?"

"I think we have to tell," Khe Mien replied after a moment of thought. "But how we tell it, and to whom we tell it first, will determine a lot. If news spreads that a delegation from the Green Dome has been accused of espionage by another Dome, it could worsen relations between the two Domes, or worse, it could be used by Su Dinh Lam and those who share his views as evidence to close the Green Dome forever."

“But if we don't tell,” Bach Lam said, joining the conversation from the front, “we won't be able to warn the Green Dome about what's really going on out there—about the spreading fear, about how it can turn good people into instruments of injustice.”

“That was the hardest thing,” Khe Mien said, sighing. "The truth always has two sides, and I'm still not sure which side needs to be presented first."

Ngan The Binh, listening to the conversation from behind, finally spoke, his voice carrying the certainty of many years of experience. "I think you should present it to Bien Ba Uy first, privately, as you planned to do with the Thien Ho findings. He will know how to weigh the balance between warning the community and avoiding spreading unnecessary panic. That's why he was chosen as Head of the Dome."

Khe Mien nodded, feeling part of the burden in her heart being shared by that solid advice. “Thank you,” she said. "I think it's the right path."

That night, before going to sleep, Khe Mien wrote a short line in the notebook, under the patchy notes about Thien Ho: *I have lost the documents, but I have not lost the questions. And perhaps, the question is the most important thing you bring along on this journey — the only thing no one can take away from you.*