After that conversation atop Hokage Rock, Senju Shinichi's life appeared to return to normal. He attended class during the day, trained after school, and occasionally went to Ichiraku Ramen at night to fight Naruto Uzumaki over the last bowl of chashu. Iruka Umino wrote in his weekly journal comments that his "attention in class has noticeably improved lately." Ino said he "doesn't look quite so much like he's plotting some conspiracy anymore," and even Sasuke had rare words of praise after their shuriken sparring: "You didn't zone out today." Only Hinata felt he was still the same as before, because whenever she secretly looked at him, he was writing in his notebook, no different from before.
The difference was in that notebook.
He poured out every scrap of intelligence on Root he had gathered over the past year, covering the entire floor of his room. Patrol records from the Kennel dogs, the distribution of bases from Snake Face's memory fragments, Crow Face's experience setting traps and its descriptions of Root's preferred architectural layouts, material transport routes from old financial documents brought back from an abandoned archive room, and every pattern of suspicious activity that Three-Leg and White Paw had discovered on the outskirts of the village over the past few months. Each fragment alone was just a scattered clue, but when he connected every intersection with red string, a clear outline emerged on the paper.
Root had three public outposts on Konoha's outskirts—the supply transfer station in the abandoned warehouse district, the communications node beneath the old water tower, and the archive room under the textile factory. He had long since mapped out all three, but Danzo's core base was not in any of them. A true secret base had to meet at least five conditions: it needed to be