"The suspicion did not begin after the Night of the Nine-Tails."
When Gen wrote that sentence on the first page of the Clan Meeting minutes, the Meeting Hall fell utterly silent.
It carried too much weight.
So much that many people's first reaction was not anger, but bewilderment.
If the suspicion had arisen only after the disaster, the Uchiha could still have understood it as the village's fear, resentment over its losses, and distrust from its leadership.
But if a path for that suspicion had been laid before the disaster, the implications were entirely different.
It meant someone had prepared a way to direct suspicion toward the Uchiha before the Nine-Tails ever appeared.
Uchiha Jun stood up, his voice trembling.
"So we were being set up from the very beginning?"
Fugaku raised a hand, holding back the emotions on the verge of erupting.
"Sit down."
Uchiha Jun did not sit down immediately.
Fugaku's voice grew heavier.
"I said, sit down."
This time, he sat back down.
Fugaku looked around at everyone.
"Turn every inference into a chain of evidence first."
Those words were cold.
But they were also the only way to keep the Clan Meeting from spiraling out of control.
If they let their anger loose today, their enemy would get exactly the spectacle he wanted.
The Uchiha lost control of their emotions after discovering discrepancies in an old case.
The Uchiha used the Night of the Nine-Tails to dredge up old grievances.
The Uchiha disregarded the village's overall stability.
Danzo would not even need to write those lines himself. Someone would spread them for him.
Gen picked up where Fugaku left off.
"Prearranged suspicion is not a conclusion. It's a direction for our investigation."
He broke the chain of evidence into four parts.
First, old patrol clearance had