Chapter 68 — The Last Seed Keeper

A small piece of paper slid through the crack of Khe Mien's bedroom door in the middle of the night, without warning, just a soft rustle enough to wake her from her restless sleep. She sat up, her heart beating rapidly, and picked up the piece of paper in the dim light filtering through the window.

*Third floor library, east door, one hour after midnight. Come alone. — D.B.T.*

Khe Mien immediately recognized the acronym, and an internal struggle raged in her mind — between the caution that the group had pledged to strictly adhere to since arriving at the Upper Dome, and a strong premonition that this might be the only chance to better understand what was really going on behind the conference's diplomatic veneer.

She woke up Bach Lam, who was sleeping in the next room, and told him the entire content of the note. He read it over and over again with a worried frown.

"This could be a trap," he said. "Canh Ba Tuyen may be testing Doanh Ba Thong's loyalty by using him to trap us."

"Maybe," Khe Mien admitted. "But if I don't go, we'll never know whether he's trying to help us or not. Remember what Duong Thi Yen said? Sometimes the first proposal isn't what they really want. Maybe that's also true of Doanh Ba Thong himself — he plays the role of a neutral observer in front of the Central Council, but maybe that's not the whole of him."

"I'll go with you, keep your distance," Bach Lam said, his voice leaving no room for argument. "Not alone, no matter what the letter says."

They left the room in the dark, moving through the deserted corridors of the Upper Dome with the utmost caution, avoiding areas with light from the surveillance devices that Ngan The Binh had spent the afternoon observing and memorizing the location of while the group pretended to take a leisurely stroll.

The library on the third floor was a large room, with ceiling-high bookshelves filled with old notebooks and documents. The air carried the smell of old paper and the dust of time, completely different from the sterile cleanliness of other areas in the Upper Dome that they had passed through. Doanh Ba Thong is waiting at the east door, his figure hidden in the shadow of a high bookshelf.

“You're here,” he said, his voice filled with undisguised relief. "I'm not sure you'd risk it."

"I've risked a lot of things since the day I left the Green Dome," Khe Mien replied. "What do you want to show me?"

Doanh Ba Thong led them to a hidden corner of the library, where a small, almost invisible door was hidden behind a bookshelf that could swing out, leading into a much smaller room, containing documents that were more carefully preserved than the rest of the library.

“This is the Private Archives,” he said, his voice dropping to a whisper even though there was no one else nearby. "Only the highest-ranking members of the Central Council are allowed in. I have limited access thanks to my role as an observer, but I've never dared to stay long enough to read closely, until tonight."

He pulled out a thin file of documents from his jacket and handed it to Khe Mien with slightly shaking hands. “This is a copy I hastily copied from a genealogical record,” he said. "About Loi Bach Dat's lineage."

Khe Mien opened the document under the weak light from a small lamp Bach Lam had brought along, and as her eyes scanned the words, she felt her breath catch. The family tree spanned generations, and near its roots, a name was marked with a frighteningly familiar symbol—two curved lines embracing a small circle in the middle, identical to the symbol they had found on Dai Van Cuong's insignia and on the wall of the ruined monitoring station.

"Loi Bach Dat's great-grandfather," Doanh Ba Thong said, his voice low, "was one of the senior executives of the Thien Ho Group before the Great Transformation. After the disaster, he was one of the first to establish control over the area that became today's Upper Dome, with resources and technology that no other surviving community could match."

“You're saying that the Central Council is the direct descendant of the Heavenly Protector,” Bach Lam said, his voice heavy, even though it wasn't a question.

"I'm saying that I believe it to be true, based on what I just read," Doanh Ba Thong replied. "But I don't yet have complete evidence as to whether the Guardians actually caused the Great Cataclysm on purpose, or whether they simply took advantage of the disaster to consolidate power after it happened. That's a question I think can only be answered by further documents, which are kept in a place even more heavily guarded than this room."

"Original Seed Warehouse," Khe Mien said softly, a premonition suddenly rising in her heart.

Doanh Ba Thong looked at her with a slight surprise. “You heard about it,” he said, not a question. "I don't know for certain whether it exists in the true mythical sense, but if there is a place that holds the entire truth about what happened before and during the Great Cataclysm, I believe it lies somewhere in the deepest levels of the Upper Dome, a place even I have never been allowed to go to."

A sudden noise came from the hallway outside—footsteps, steady, approaching—and all three froze in silence. Doanh Ba Thong quickly stuffed the documents back into a hidden compartment, signaling them to retreat into the darkness behind the bookshelf.

“Canh Ba Tuyen regularly patrols at this hour,” he whispered, his voice tense. "If he finds out we're here, I won't be able to protect either of you."

The footsteps stopped just outside the library door for a long, breathless moment, then continued to move farther away in another direction. When the sound finally completely dissipated, all three breathed a sigh of relief, although the tension still clearly lingered on each face.

"We need to get out of here," Bach Lam said. "Right now."

"Before you go," Doanh Ba Thong said, holding Khe Mien back for a brief moment, his eyes taking on a new seriousness. "I want you to understand this clearly — if I were discovered to have helped you, I would no longer be a neutral observer. I would become a traitor in the eyes of the Central Council. I took that risk, not because I had complete faith in the path you were on, but because I had spent too many years watching this world slowly crumble at the hands of people like Lei Baida, and I no longer wanted to just stand by and watch."

"Thank you," Khe Mien said, clearly feeling the weight of the sacrifice this mysterious man had just placed on her shoulders. "I won't forget this."

The next morning, before the second session of the conference began, Khe Mien gathered Bach Lam, Ngan The Binh, Diem Quynh and Kien alone in the break room, recounting everything that had happened last night in as low a voice as possible, even though she knew clearly that there was no guarantee that this room was completely safe from the eyes and ears of the Central Council.

"If that's true," Diem Quynh said, her voice shaking with a mixture of rage and fear, "then the man who stood before us yesterday, speaking of peace and justice, is the grandson of those who destroyed the world."

"We don't have evidence to publicly accuse," Ngan The Binh warned, his voice cautious as usual. "A family tree hastily copied in the night is not strong enough to overthrow a President of the Central Council in front of representatives of all the Arches. If we announce it too early, too hastily, we will only make ourselves considered crazy slanderers, and lose all the credibility we have worked so hard to build."

"So what do we do with this information?" Kien asked, his eyes shifting from person to person, searching for a clear answer amid complexities far beyond anything he had ever faced.

Khe Mien was silent for a moment, looking down at the seed box in her lap, feeling its familiar weight as a fulcrum amid the storm of information swirling in her head. "We keep it, like a knife hidden in a sleeve," she said at last. "We won't announce it today, but we won't forget it either. And when the time comes — when we have enough evidence, enough allies, enough strength to tell the truth without being crushed immediately — we will use it."

Bach Lam nodded in agreement, but his eyes still carried an unrelieved worry. “In the meantime,” he said, “we need to focus on what we can do right now — reject the Unity Pact, and find a way to pull the other Arches to our side before Loi Bach Dat has a chance to tear them apart one by one.”

As the group prepared to leave the room for the second session, Khe Mien clutched the seed box one last time, acutely aware that the battle they were entering now had a depth and a danger far beyond anything she had ever prepared herself to face.

That night, after the second session ended in an atmosphere even more tense than the opening day, Khe Mien lay awake, her mind reeling from what she had discovered — no longer a vague fragment of memory from Co Diem Ninh or Cau Bach Thinh's account, but a concrete confirmation, with a name, with a face, that the very man who was chairing this peace conference was a direct descendant of the organization that could have been behind the disaster. destroy the whole world. And she understood that, without complete evidence, this was the final piece of the puzzle she needed to convince the other Arches that the path to true peace could not pass through the hands of the Central Council.