Chapter 7 — The Last Seed Keeper

The first cough Khe Mien heard from Co Diem Ninh happened on a morning so ordinary that she almost didn't notice it - a short, dry cough, hastily suppressed, while the old woman was checking the humidity of a tray of newly warehoused seeds. If it were a year ago, Khe Mien probably would have ignored it like any other background sound in the Grain Warehouse. But three years of learning to pay attention to the smallest signs — the curl of a flower petal, the hue of a leaf starting to wilt — have instilled in her a habit of observation that she can't turn off, even when the object of observation isn't a plant.

"Are you okay?" she asked, stopping mid-work.

"It's just dust," Co Diem Ninh replied, waving her hand as if to dismiss something trivial. "You keep working."

Khe Mien didn't ask further, but she remembered. And in the weeks that followed, she noticed that cough return, not often, but more regularly — once while they were carrying a heavy bucket of dirt, once on a cold morning as they stepped from the warm residential area into the cooler air of the Grain Warehouse. Co Diem Ninh never complained, never let a cough interrupt her work for more than a few seconds, but Khe Mien began to notice that she sat and rested more between tasks, leaving the physically demanding tasks — lifting boxes, climbing ladders to check high shelves — to Khe Mien to do more than before, although she never directly said why.

One afternoon, when the cough became much more intense, lasting so long that Co Diem Ninh had to sit down in a chair, one hand covering her chest, Khe Mien could no longer pretend not to see.

"I'm going to call someone at the infirmary," she said, already standing up, her voice shaking with worry.

"No need." Co Diem Ninh raised her hand to stop her, even though her breathing was still rapid. "Sit down here with me for a moment."

Khe Mien reluctantly sat down on the opposite chair, watching the old woman gradually regain her breath. Her face was still a bit pale but her eyes had returned to their familiar calmness.

"I'm seventy-three years old, Khe Mien," she said, her voice soft as if she were talking about the weather. "The people in the Green Dome, if they're lucky, live to be eighty, maybe a little more. This is not a surprise. My body is doing exactly what a seventy-three year old's body should do."

“But you can go see a doctor, there might be a treatment—”

"I went to the doctor," Co Diem Ninh interrupted, her voice still calm. "The people at the clinic say my lungs are weak, partly because of age, partly because of decades of working in the dry air of the Grain Warehouse. They can give me medicine to make it easier to breathe, and I'm taking it. But they can't make me young again, Khe Mien, and I don't expect them to. What I'm worried about isn't my own death — I've lived a long enough, meaningful enough life to not fear that. What I'm worried about is whether Are you ready, if that day comes sooner than I expect?"

Khe Mien was silent, feeling something stuck in her throat. She was fourteen years old, had been studying for five years, but had never really imagined a day when the Warehouse would not have Co Diem Ninh sitting on an old wooden chair between two rows of shelves.

"I'm not ready," she said honestly, her voice quiet.

"I know," Co Diem Ninh replied, without any intention of blaming. "No one has ever been ready, not even me when I was a disciple. But readiness is not something that comes completely in one day — it accumulates, like the lines in your notebook, until you realize you've been ready without even realizing it." She stood up, more slowly than usual, and motioned for Khe Mien to follow her to the deepest corner of the Granary, where the light was paler and the air smelled more strongly of old paper than anywhere else in the room.

“I never told you about the Root Store,” she said, her voice taking on a different tone, almost like the tone people use when telling fairy tales to children, even though Khe Mien was no longer a small child.

"What is Root Seed Warehouse?"

"A legend. Maybe just a legend." Co Diem Ninh sat down on a low stool and signaled Khe Mien to sit next to him. "My teacher — the old agricultural engineer I once told you about — once, one night when he drank too much of the fermented grain wine we sometimes make, told me about a place he called the Original Grain Warehouse: a seed repository built before the Great Change, containing not just a few hundred strains like our Grain Vault, but possibly tens of thousands, diverse enough to recreate almost the entire agricultural ecosystem of the world old, if one day it becomes possible."

"Where is it?"

"He didn't say it clearly, or perhaps he himself didn't know for sure, just heard it from others. Some say it was in the Upper Dome, the most powerful Dome we know of, where the Central Council that coordinates relations between the Domes is located. Some say it was completely destroyed during the Great Change itself, remaining only in legend as a comforting legend for those of us who keep the seed — a way to believe that somewhere, even if we fail failed, there is still a safe copy of life stored."

Khe Mien sat still, trying to imagine an archive so large that it contained tens of thousands of strains, a hundred times larger than the rows of shelves in front of her right now.

"Do you believe it's true?"

Co Diem Ninh was silent for a long time, her eyes looking far into the space between two rows of shelves, as if trying to remember something that had faded over time.

"I don't know," she said finally. "But there's one detail in that old man's story that I've never forgotten, even though I'm not sure I remember it correctly. He said that the builder of the Original Grain Warehouse, before the Great Change, was not a simple agricultural organization, but a much larger corporation — he mentioned a name, just once, and then never mentioned it again no matter how many times I asked after that. Thien Ho. Thien Ho Corporation."

She paused, as if the very saying of that name made her consider it.

"I don't know what that name means, or why he only mentioned it once and then fell silent as if he had missed something. Perhaps it was just the name of an ordinary company among the thousands of companies in the world before the Great Change, nothing special. But the way he said that name — as something heavier than a normal name should be — made it stay in my mind for more than fifty years, even though I never found out anything more about it. it."

"Haven't you ever asked anyone else about that name?"

"I asked, a few times, when I was younger. No one knew, or no one wanted to say." Co Diem Ninh looked at Khe Mien, her eyes became more serious than the moment before. "I'm telling you this, not because I think it's important — perhaps it's just a meaningless fragment of memory of an old man who got drunk fifty years ago. But the keeper of the seed, Khe Mien, doesn't just keep the seed. We keep even incomplete pieces of memory like this, because sometimes, we don't know how important a small piece of memory will become until someone, at another time, puts it together with other pieces that we haven't yet. ever had."

Khe Mien nodded, although she did not fully understand the meaning of what she had just heard. She took out her notebook—her third, the first two already filled to the brim and kept carefully in her own drawer—and wrote down, word for word, the story of the Root Store and the name Thien Ho, even though she didn't know if she'd ever need it.

That night, when she returned home, Khe Mien told her father about Co Diem Ninh's cough, but she kept the story about the Root Store and that strange name to herself — not because she thought it was something to hide, but because she felt, instinctively, that it was something too fragile, too unclear to share before she understood what it was. She wrote in her notebook before going to sleep, her last words of the day:

*There are seeds we sow without knowing what kind of tree they will grow into, or whether they will grow or not. Today, Ms. Diem Ninh planted such a seed in my head. I will keep it, even though I don't know why.*