Midnight Archive Search at the Former ANBU Site and an Impeccable Procedure

The moonlight was cold.

It passed through the wildly overgrown weeds in the courtyard of the former ANBU site, filtering in through cobweb-covered window lattices and cutting several ghastly pale bands across the floor.

Namikaze Minato pushed open the archives' door gently, but the rotten hinges still let out a long groan.

The air was thick with the distinctive stench of dust mixed with decaying paper.

This place had once been Konoha's very core, but now it resembled a vast grave forgotten by time.

Minato did not light a lamp. To a ninja, darkness was no obstacle. Relying on memory, he skirted collapsed shelves and debris strewn across the floor, heading straight for the deepest part of the archive room.

That was where the S-Rank mission Scrolls were kept, along with... top-secret internal review records.

He wanted to find Baishi's weakness.

No one's rise to power could possibly be flawless. Especially in a place like ANBU, the blood on one's hands and the bones beneath one's feet would always leave traces.

As long as he found one improper order, one unauthorized operation, one falsified report, he could seize that loose thread and see what kind of person Baishi truly was.

He found Baishi's personal file cabinet. The seal affixed to it had long since dried and cracked, crumbling into powder at the slightest touch.

Minato pulled open the cabinet and took out the first Scroll.

The Scroll's serial number was old. It documented a series of missions concerning the pursuit of Root remnants. At the time, Baishi had still been an ordinary ANBU operative.

Minato read it word by word, line by line.

Mission briefings, operational plans, personnel assignments, risk assessments... everything was entirely by the book. Yet attached to the end of the file was a supplementary report handwritten