Conventional communication systems are mainly designed to reduce error rates and increase transmission rates, and therefore usually provide uniform protection to all transmitted messages. However, in intent-oriented applications, different messages may have different semantic meanings and importance levels, requiring different levels of reliability. This paper proposes a layered construction of message-level unequal error protection (UEP) codes for short-blocklength communication. Instead of appending an explicit protection tag to each codeword, the proposed method embeds the protection structure directly into the Hamming-distance structure of the codebook. By assigning larger minimum intra-level distances to higher-importance message groups and imposing suitable inter-level distance constraints, the proposed codebook provides differentiated error-correction capabilities while enabling reliable importance-level classification at the receiver. Theoretical conditions for correct group classification are derived, and simulations over AWGN and VLC-ISI channels show that the proposed scheme improves BER performance and group classification accuracy compared with a tag-based ECC baseline.