Che tucked the note Mine had given him into the innermost layer of his workbook.
It was neither a ninjutsu scroll nor an intelligence communiqué, just an ordinary sheet of paper. Its edges were unevenly cut, and the ink was faint. In any adult's eyes, it carried little weight. Yet whenever Che opened his workbook, he always looked at it first.
If you wanted to know, you could ask whether you were allowed to know.
It was a simple sentence, simple enough to sound like a child's logic. But in the ninja world, many simple truths struggled to survive. Those who wanted to know often peeked in secret. Those who could answer often stayed silent. And those holding the answers liked to call silence protection. Over time, doors stopped feeling like doors and became more like walls.
Before morning training, Takuya announced that there would be a registration Q&A session that afternoon.
Kiyo immediately became wary. "A Q&A? A relative of exams?"
"It's not an exam."
"Then it's a distant relative of exams."
Takuya gave him a look. "You can think of it as practice knocking on doors."
Che's heart stirred.
The so-called registration Q&A was a routine confirmation before the ninja academy transition. The children could ask their teachers about the parts of their training records they were permitted to know, or ask which parts they could not know and why. The teachers were not required to answer everything, but they had to explain the scope of their refusal. It sounded like a very small system, but Che knew that for them, it was already no small thing.
After hearing this, Zhen Shu's first reaction was not happiness but a frown. "What if asking gets us recorded?"
Takuya said, "It will be recorded. The record will note what type