Seventeen complaints lay on the table.
Uchiha Gen did not look at the signatures first.
He looked at the sentences.
"The Uchiha patrols are heavy-handed."
"The Uchiha registration process makes people uneasy."
"If the Konoha Military Police Force keeps expanding its authority, the Resettlement Zone will lose its freedom."
Those three sentences appeared repeatedly across the seventeen complaints.
Some changed the order.
Some changed a few words.
But the structure was exactly the same.
Itachi quickly circled all the similar sentences.
"A template."
Shisui stood beside him.
"The villagers might not all have bad intentions."
"Right."
Uchiha Gen nodded.
"Someone gave them a template for expressing their fear."
That was more troublesome than a simple frame-up.
Because there was genuine fear in the complaints.
The people in the Resettlement Zone did not trust the Uchiha.
They worried about the Konoha Military Police Force expanding its authority.
They feared being targeted after registering.
None of that was false.
This mixture of truth and falsehood was precisely what Uchiha Gen guarded against most.
If all the complaints were false, dismantling them would actually be simple.
They would only need to find the witnesses, match up the routes, and expose the lies.
But that was not the case now.
Someone had packed genuine fears into a standardized template.
That meant that if the Uchiha only dismantled the template, it would look as though they were dismissing the villagers' fears.
If they only soothed those fears, they would let whoever had taught people the template off the hook.
Neither side could be neglected.
That was what made governing more troublesome than fighting.
The manufactured part was that someone had organized those fears into the same wording, then made them erupt all at once.
Uchiha Jun held back his anger.
"Do we still accept them,