Monitoring minors had been hidden in the preliminaries to the Relocation Order all along.
When Gen saw the risk observation summary, his first reaction was not surprise.
It was disgust.
That disgust came from a sense of familiarity.
The Old-Shell System always worked this way.
It never put its true purpose in writing at the outset.
First, it wrote down concern.
Then assessment.
Then protection.
And finally, it became surveillance.
The Uchiha Risk Observation Summary never explicitly mentioned monitoring minors.
Yet every entry framed Uchiha children as potential risks.
Highly gifted individuals.
Clan leanings.
Identification with the village.
Emotions influenced by the clan.
These terms seemed neutral.
But placed among the preliminary risk documents for the Relocation Order, they were no longer neutral.
They would leave the leadership with an impression.
The Uchiha were not merely a risk in the present.
Their next generation was a risk, too.
As Itachi looked at those lines, his fingers slowly tightened.
He was still very young.
But he could already understand what lay behind those words.
His generation had been placed under some form of observation long ago.
Not because they had done anything.
But because they had been born into the Uchiha.
Shisui's expression was grim as well.
He understood better than Itachi what "high-influence individual" meant.
A term like that would not merely document talent.
It would record how many fellow clan members a person could influence, how many villagers he could influence, whether he could be used, and whether he could be restricted.
Inside the Hokage Building, Danzo described the document as a protective assessment.
"If highly gifted minors become emotionally unstable after a disaster, it will affect their relationship with the village. Observation is protection, not persecution."
Fugaku looked at him.
"If this is a protective assessment, why is