Aoi's fingers paused on the supplemental page.
He could not see.
Yet he was more certain than many who could.
"The paper is too new."
He said.
"The fibers are tightly compressed, and the edges were cut differently, too."
The archives ninja turned pale.
Because those judgments did not come from the writing.
Nor from the contents.
They came from the paper itself.
Gen did not let anyone press him about who had replaced it.
He knew that asking for a name now would only give the other side a chance to attack the testimony.
If a blind old man suddenly named someone crucial, it would be easy to claim he had been led.
So he had Fugaku ask only about procedure.
Fugaku spoke. "Did the procedure for adding supplemental pages back then permit a blank receipt field?"
Aoi shook his head.
"No."
His voice was quiet, but clear.
"No matter how chaotic things were after the disaster, someone had to receive anything entered into the files. Without a receipt signature, there was no way to know who put the paper in."
That statement made the blank receipt field an undeniable problem.
Mitokado Homura asked gravely, "Are you certain?"
Aoi raised his head.
His eyes were hidden beneath the white cloth.
"After I lost my sight, my memory wasn't as good as it used to be. But procedure is not something I would remember wrong."
No one in the Conference Room laughed.
Because archives ninja relied on procedure more than anything.
To them, procedure was more reliable than names.
Gen had Fugaku move on to the second question.
"Were any urgent documents allowed to bypass normal filing back then?"
Aoi fell silent for a long time.
Danzo's fingers moved slightly.
At last, Aoi spoke.
"Yes."
The atmosphere in the Conference