Konoha Hospital, seventh basement level.
The air here carried a perpetual blend of disinfectant and heat from precision instruments. The corridors were pure white, and so were the lights, their brightness almost unreal, casting people's shadows onto the floor with extraordinary clarity.
Tsunade stopped before the Special Care Unit's heavy metal doors.
Two ANBU wearing fox masks stood on either side like statues. They showed no reaction to her arrival, merely crossing their hands as a matter of routine to form a release seal.
The metal doors slid open silently.
Beyond them lay another world of pure white. Namikaze Minato lay quietly on an isolation bed, with over a dozen tubes and cables of different colors attached to his body, leading to a row of humming monitoring devices beside the bed.
Tsunade did not look at Minato first. Her gaze went straight to the main monitor's screen.
On the screen, the line representing Minato's chakra fluctuations was as steady as a straight line drawn with a ruler.
Too steady.
As the Shinobi World's foremost medical ninja, she knew full well that no living being could remain absolutely stable. Such a "perfect" curve was itself the greatest abnormality.
A few days earlier, an extremely faint spike had appeared on that line, vanishing in an instant. She had reviewed the logs afterward, but the system had automatically classified it as "transient interference," triggering no alarms.
"Lady Tsunade."
The medical Jonin on duty hurried over, holding an electronic record tablet.
"This is the summary report of his vital signs over the past twenty-four hours. All readings are within safe thresholds."
Tsunade took the tablet, but her gaze did not linger on the summarized green data. Instead, she swiped straight to the underlying raw data stream. She pointed to a spot on the screen.