When the ledger pages were brought to the review meeting, everyone looked at the color of the paper first.
The pages before and after it had already yellowed.
Only the page in the middle was a shade lighter.
Without a close look, it could easily have been mistaken for a difference in preservation.
But Che spotted the problem at a glance.
The paper fibers were different.
So was the ink.
Most importantly, the impressions at the foot of the page did not line up with those on the surrounding pages.
"A replacement page."
Che's voice was low, but certain.
The archival ninja from the Hokage Building looked troubled.
Danzo said calmly, "Pages were replaced during the post-disaster reorganization. That is not unusual."
He had prepared that response well in advance.
After the Night of the Nine-Tails, vast numbers of Konoha's records had been damaged.
Reorganization, transcription, and page replacement had all taken place.
If it was merely a replacement page, that alone did not prove anything.
Gen looked at Che.
Che laid out the paper batch comparison.
"This paper comes from a batch produced after the Night of the Nine-Tails."
The Conference Room fell silent.
Paper produced after the Night of the Nine-Tails was not unusual.
The problem was that it had replaced a record of the Old Permission Entry from the week before the Night of the Nine-Tails.
In other words, after the Original Record had been removed or destroyed, someone had used new paper to replace this page after the disaster.
Mitokado Homura frowned.
"Post-disaster reconstruction of records could also explain that."
Gen spoke. "Then please retrieve the records for the page replacement procedure."
He did not argue.
If they claimed this was a routine page replacement, there should have been a procedure to go with it.
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