The Bloody Mystery at the Guesthouse and Compliant Protective House Arrest

The lights in the Hokage's Office were split into patches of brightness and shadow by the sight of an ANBU kneeling on one knee.

The scent of ink from the previous scroll still lingered in the air, but it was already being thinned by an invisible tension.

"All the clues point to our Konoha ANBU."

The words were like a cold needle, stabbing into the silence.

The reporting ANBU kept his head bowed low. His Cat Mask concealed every expression, but the taut lines of his shoulders and back betrayed his unease.

Baishi said nothing.

He merely stood by the window, gazing at the distant outline of Hokage Rock as if admiring a painting that had remained unchanged since time immemorial.

The pain caused by the conflicting Chakra inside his body battered his Meridians like reefs beneath a hidden current, wave after wave. Yet that agony only made his mind clearer.

An old trick of framing someone else and shifting the blame.

The method was crude, but the timing was devilishly precise.

The Sand Emissary Group had barely set foot in Konoha when the Amegakure envoy was attacked. A minute earlier, and Sunagakure would not yet have been drawn into the game; a minute later, and the situation of a three-party negotiation would already have taken shape.

Yet it had happened now, on the very night he had lured both Emissary Groups into the same Guesthouse No. 3.

The dirty water had been thrown at exactly the right moment.

The goal was not to kill the Amegakure envoy, but to throw the entire game into chaos—to saddle Konoha with suspicion it could never wash away, give Amegakure's fury an outlet, and let Sunagakure reap the benefits from the sidelines.

Baishi could even imagine how Inuzuka of Sunagakure would stand up