As his investigation deepened, the more information the adult Sasuke uncovered, the deeper the crease between his brows became. It had barely relaxed at all.
Drawing on his familiarity with the village, he pieced together an outline of this parallel world from scrolls in Konoha's archives, encrypted records left behind by the ANBU, and even snippets of drunken chatter from retired old ninja.
Each piece of information was like an oddly shaped puzzle piece, forced into the framework of understanding he had built from his own world's experiences with an unsettling creak.
The first distorted piece of information concerned Shimura Danzō.
In the history he knew, Danzo had always lurked in the shadows, his arm covered in Sharingan, carrying out Root's will with obsessive fervor. He had ultimately died at Sasuke's hands, paying part of the price for the Uchiha's destruction.
Yet according to this world's intelligence, Danzo had defected after the Joint Chunin Ninja Exams.
He had been charged with ordering Orochimaru to collude with the Sand Ninja and launch the Konoha Crush Plan, intending to eliminate the Third Hokage and become Hokage himself.
That alone was bizarre enough.
But what Sasuke found even more absurd was the second, related piece of information: Orochimaru.
In his understanding, Orochimaru was a cold, ruthless man obsessed with immortality and forbidden jutsu, who had defected from Konoha, founded Otogakure, and become the "teacher" Sasuke had once followed. Yet in this world's official records and certain secret rumors, that image had undergone a strange shift.
According to those accounts, many of Orochimaru's early, horrifying human experiments and efforts to develop forbidden jutsu had not been driven entirely by his own crazed thirst for knowledge, but had been carried out at the behest of Danzo, who had since defected.
Danzo ordered Orochimaru around?
*Would