One public grievance had been written as three people's voices.
The discovery silenced the Uchiha Clan Compound completely.
They had always believed the Relocation Order stemmed from the villagers' fear and the leadership's distrust.
Both were certainly real.
But if fear was amplified when excerpted, and records were split apart when compiled, then the Uchiha were bearing more than public resentment.
They were also bearing public resentment that had been manipulated.
Itachi studied the original records and the appendix, his brow tightly furrowed.
"This isn't fabrication."
Gen nodded.
"That's why it's more dangerous."
Fabrications were easy to disprove.
Manipulation was different.
It preserved real events.
It preserved real emotions.
It merely split one incident into three, described one scene as several locations, and turned one dispute into a trend.
Something written that way was difficult to dismiss with a simple accusation of false records.
Fugaku returned to the Hokage Building with the review results.
He did not claim the entire appendix was false.
He only stated that the public grievance excerpts contained duplicate entries from the same sources, and their weighting needed to be recalculated.
Mitokado Homura frowned. "Post-disaster statistics are crude to begin with. Recalculating them won't mean much."
Fugaku replied, "If they were merely crude, they should be crude across the board. If duplication and amplification only appear in records involving the Uchiha, that isn't ordinary imprecision."
His words silenced the Conference Room once more.
This comparison was exactly what Gen wanted.
They could not look only at the Uchiha records.
They had to see how other departments had been documented during the same period.
Crow retrieved the post-disaster public grievance excerpts concerning other departments.
The Medical Squad had received complaints about slow treatment.
The Logistics Squad had received complaints about unequal distribution of supplies.
The Barrier Team