With that, he turned and walked toward another lab bench, leaving Uchiha Makoto standing there with a faint chill running down his back.
What exactly had Orochimaru noticed?
He dared not let his guard down and stepped up surveillance.
The footage sent back by the flock of crows showed that Hatake Sakumo was leaving his house less and less often.
On the rare occasions he appeared, he was alone, walking silently through the streets in casual clothes.
The admiring, reverent gazes of the past had vanished, replaced by all kinds of complicated looks: pointing and whispering, deliberate avoidance, cold scrutiny... The ninja who had once treated him with such respect now either lowered their heads and hurried past or simply took a detour when they saw him.
That invisible, icy isolation cut deeper than any vicious curse.
Through his remote observation ninjutsu, Uchiha Makoto watched Sakumo's back from afar. It was still straight, yet seemed to bear a crushing weight. He silently noted:
The breaking point of his mental state... It should be almost time.
He brought up another screen, displaying the system's "Public opinion analysis report on the White Fang incident."
A dense array of names, faction labels, excerpts of statements, suspicion scores... Everyone who had publicly stepped forward to criticize Sakumo had been recorded.
Some of them used strikingly similar rhetoric, targeted precisely the most damaging points, and spread their remarks at an abnormal speed. The system had flagged them in red: "Suspected organized campaign."
These were very likely Root's handiwork, or at least the result of deliberate manipulation by certain factions.
Uchiha Makoto encrypted the data and archived it.
Just because it was useless now didn't mean it would be useless later.
In Konoha, information was power, and dirt... sometimes made a decent bargaining chip too.
He