The medical ninja tool workshop's old ledgers were harder to decipher than the tubing in the underground room.
The paper had survived war and relocation, and many pages had only half left.
The Recorder reconstructed the brass connectors' fabrication markings, material ratios, and gaps in the batch records one by one, finally confirming that two batches of equipment had come from the same set of molds.
The first batch had been officially delivered to Konoha.
The second had vanished en route to the Land of Fire.
It had disappeared before Root was established, and before the earliest existing research records on Hashirama cells.
The escort team had reported an attack by bandits.
Yet only the tubing, chakra pumps, and cell culture containers had been lost.
The food, money, and ordinary medicines had all been left on the wagons.
This had not been a bandit robbery.
The attackers had known exactly which pieces of equipment were used in cell experiments.
The connectors used in the underground old man's room were far more likely to have come from the missing batch than the batch entered into Konoha's inventory.
Their bases bore an old groove that the workshop had later discontinued, while the equipment officially delivered to Konoha had already been changed to the new specifications before entering storage.
This discovery changed their assessment of the source of the Hashirama cells.
The underground experiments had not necessarily used samples leaked from Konoha's current stock.
Someone might have intercepted the equipment and cellular material before Konoha formally established its storage system.
Danzo immediately seized on this point.
"Since the equipment never entered storage, Root had nothing to do with the underground experiments."
Shikaku did not accept that conclusion in full.
The missing equipment could establish that the underground experiments had an earlier source.
But