Chapter 88 — The Last Seed Keeper

The lock released with a dry click, and as Khe Mien pushed open the heavy metal door, it groaned on hinges rusted from decades of disuse, revealing a steep staircase leading down into the deep darkness below, the air escaping from it carrying a smell of mold and old metal that she had never smelled in any of the Grains she had known. A blast of cold air blew onto her face, carrying with it the dry smell of dust that had settled over decades without anyone disturbing it, and in that moment, her heart beat so hard that she could hear the sound of blood rushing in her ears, mixed with the sound of pursuing footsteps still echoing somewhere behind.

"Go quickly," Doanh Ba Thong urged, turning on the small flashlight he brought, and the three rushed down the stairs just as the footsteps of the pursuing soldiers sounded more clearly above.

The stairs led down a long hallway, the walls reinforced with thick steel on both sides, quite different from the structure above ground, and when they reached the end of the hallway, a larger door appeared, which had been left partially open before — a sign that perhaps Canh Ba Tuyen himself or someone under his command had recently been down here, possibly trying to remove the contents inside.

Inside, Doanh Ba Thong's flashlight swept across a surprisingly vast space, rows of metal shelves stretching out into the darkness as far as the eye could see, each shelf filled with hundreds of small storage boxes, identical to the ones Khe Mien had spent a lifetime tending in the Green Dome's Grain Warehouse, but in far greater quantities, stored in a temperature and humidity control system more sophisticated than anything she had ever seen.

"Oh my god," Khe Mien whispered, walking slowly between the rows of shelves, her hand shaking as she touched one of the nearest boxes, reading the label written in an ancient, mechanically precise script, completely different from the familiar handwriting on boxes like the one at Green Dome. "This... all these breeds."

She brought her nose close to a small gap in the lid of the box, inhaled softly, and realized that even the scent was different — not the familiar smell of old paper mixed with dry soil of the Green Dome Seed Warehouse, but a neutral, almost sterile smell, as if these seeds had been completely isolated from the outside world, from all human hands, for all those years.

Kien, walking beside her, read aloud a few other stickers, his voice carrying a mix of surprise and indignation. "Cypress beans — original line, harvested last year before the Great Change. Salt-tolerant rice — ninety-seven variant lines. Temperate fruit trees — more than fifty species, some completely extinct outside this warehouse."

“They have everything,” Khe Mien said, her voice choked with a complex emotion that couldn't be named — both amazement at the unprecedented abundance, and utter indignation at the thought of all these precious lineages being hidden, locked away, while thousands of people across Dong Tro struggled with failed harvests, with lineages weakening with each generation. "While the Green Dome was nearly wiped out by the Root Rot, while the Mist Dome collapsed because it didn't have enough resources to recover, all of this sat here, safe, locked away, reserved only for 'the worthy'."

Footsteps sounded at the end of the hallway behind them, and Doanh Ba Thong turned around, his face tense. “They found us,” he said. "We don't have much time."

“We don't need to move it right now,” Khe Mien said, her mind working quickly under the pressure. "We just need to make sure its existence is known, and can no longer be denied or erased." She pulled out a small recording device that Diem Quynh had prepared for the trip, held it up high, recording images of the long rows of shelves and her own voice describing what she was witnessing.

Above, in the control room of Radio Toan Vom, Bach Lam stood in front of a complex control panel with dozens of buttons and screens, while Son Ba Dat held the restrained soldier tightly so he could enter the code to activate the broadcast system under the pressure of a nearby blade.

“The connection is ready,” the soldier said, his voice shaking. "But I don't know how to talk through it — I'm just a maintenance technician, not a radio person."

“Just turn it on,” Bach Lam said, and when a small red light on the control panel came on, signaling a connection had been established to every relay antenna spread across the area, he picked up an old microphone, took a deep breath, and began speaking, his voice echoing through the speaker system not only in the Upper Dome but, if everything worked as Doanh Ba Thong had described, to every Dome across Dong Tro.

“This is a message to all the Arches,” he said, his voice steady even as his heart pounded. "I am Dinh Bach Lam, a member of the Bronze Ash Network. In the next few minutes, you will hear a truth that has been hidden for generations, about the true origin of the Great Transformation, and about what is truly stored under the Upper Dome."

Underground, Doanh Ba Thong, hearing the first part of the speech through the small communication device still connecting the two groups, nodded to Khe Mien. “It's your turn,” he said.

Khe Mien raised the recording device to her mouth, and in the weak light of the Root Store, among the rows of shelves filled with things that should belong to everyone, she began to speak, her voice shaking with emotion but not wavering in her will.

"I am Vu Khe Mien, Seed Keeper of the Green Dome," she said, the words flowing automatically from a place deep within her that had been waiting for this moment for so long. "I am standing in a place called the Original Seed Vault — not legendary, but real, built by the Heavenly Guardian Corporation before the Great Cataclysm, containing thousands of original seed lines that we all believed were lost forever. It has been hidden here, at the foot of the Central Council, while the other Arches struggle to survive with what's left."

She paused for a moment, took a deep breath, then continued, her voice now carrying an unshakable certainty. "The Great Change was not an inevitable natural disaster, as the Chronicle of the Great Change has been teaching us for generations. It was a calculated choice, made by the board of directors of the Thien Ho Group, who foresaw the collapse and chose to profit from it rather than prevent it. And today's head of the Central Council, Loi Bach Dat, is a direct descendant of the very Chairman of the Board of Directors who made that decision."

Hundreds of miles away, at the Green Dome, Bien Ba Uy and Su Dinh Lam stood silently in the radio room, where the whole Council had gathered early to wait for news, and when Khe Mien's voice rang out clearly through the old loudspeaker, the whole room was plunged into a suffocating silence. Tang Dieu Lam, standing at the door with her hands clasped to her chest, felt tears rolling down her cheeks as she heard the familiar voice of her best friend speak words with historical weight. “It's her,” she whispered to those standing next to her, though no one in the room needed to be reminded of that. "That's our Khe Mien."

At the Stone Arch, in the command bunker where Wei Ba Cuong was watching the progress of the confrontation at the main gate, the sound of a broadcast suddenly interfered with all communication channels, causing all the soldiers to stop, their weapons still in their hands but their eyes all turned towards the speakers mounted on the wall. Even Han Dinh Sang, standing in the corner of the room with his usual stiff expression, could not hide his shock when he heard the name Thien Ho Group announced publicly, no longer just a vague rumor.

And right on the Ground Floor of the Upper Dome itself, where Vinh Thi Ngoan was still sitting behind her fabric stall, the sound of broadcasting rang out through the old public speaker mounted at the beginning of the alley, which was only used to convey ration notices or curfew orders. She stood up, let go of the cloth she was holding, and listened with a stupor that gradually turned into something akin to hope, while the neighbors around her also quietly walked out of their houses, gathering under the speakers as if listening to something they had been waiting for all their lives and never dared to believe would come.

The sound of running footsteps sounded closer, and Kien, standing guard at the entrance, turned around with a tense face. “They're here,” he said.

But before Khe Mien could react, another voice rang out from the other end of the hallway, not the shouting of the guards, but a calm, familiar voice, carrying a coldness that she had learned to recognize from the bottom of her heart.

“So you found it,” Loi Bach Dat said, stepping out of the darkness of the hallway, alone, unarmed, but with a danger in his eyes that was sharper than any blade. "I have to admit, I didn't think you'd go that far, Seed Keeper."