Sumire Kakei hurried over, concern plain in her eyes. "Boruto, seeing you these past two days has really worried me."
"I know everyone doubts you. They might even think you're just causing trouble."
Her voice grew softer. "But for some reason, I can't shake the feeling that you really saw something the rest of us can't."
"So when I got home, I looked through a lot of records for anything about the 'black shadow' you mentioned."
Boruto froze. Heat rushed to his eyes and the tip of his nose.
When almost everyone treated him like a nuisance or a joke, someone still believed him—enough to quietly search through records for his sake. That trust drove away the loneliness and chill in his heart.
"Don't get touched just yet." Sumire Kakei motioned for him to keep walking, and they strolled side by side down the quiet street. "I searched through my family's books and some old files my father left behind. Most of it turned up nothing."
"But in a fragment of a Travelogue Notebook about Konoha's early history, I finally found a clue that might be related."
"What is it?!" Boruto asked urgently.
Sumire Kakei lowered her voice. "The travelogue says that after Konoha was founded, a secret organization called Root once existed within the village."
"With wars breaking out so often and pressure mounting from outside, Root pursued extreme power and absolute security for the village. It carried out countless inhumane Human Experimentation and mind-control studies that later histories deliberately obscured or erased."
She looked at Boruto, her expression grave. "One passage is especially vague, but it says some failed experiments or byproducts followed people like shadows, fed on Chakra, and couldn't be seen by ordinary people."
"It sounds somewhat like the 'black shadow' you described."
"Root? Human Experimentation?"