The man who had made the threat bore no Root insignia.
No Anbu markings.
No specialized ninja tools.
He was not even registered as a ninja.
He was just an ordinary porter.
In the past, if someone like him had been caught near the guard's home, he would at most have been treated as a passerby.
But now, no one dared casually call it a coincidence.
Inside the Hokage Building, the porter hung his head, his hands trembling nonstop.
He clearly had never faced anything like this.
Crow asked a question, and he answered.
His answers came in fragments.
He said he had only taken a temporary job.
Someone had told him to wait for a package near the guard's home.
The package had never arrived.
He did not know who had left those words at the door, either.
Danzo said coldly, "An ordinary porter proves nothing."
When Gen heard the account, he felt no stir of emotion.
Danzo was right.
An ordinary porter indeed could not directly prove that Root had acted.
But that was precisely what made the old-shell system so troublesome.
It did not need every operative to bear a mark.
No mark was the best mark.
Because without a mark, responsibility could be severed.
Fugaku did not press the issue of Root.
He only requested a check of the temporary pass batch.
These passes came from the Hokage Building's administrative temporary staffing process.
Two people from the same batch had already surfaced.
One was Arai, the Investigation Team's temporary clerk.
The other was the porter near the family of the witness who had been threatened.
On the surface, the two had no connection.
One organized catalogs.
The other handled hauling.
But both had entered the Hokage Building's system through the same batch of temporary access approvals.