After the Space Slots in the Stone Cavern in the Land of Rivers closed, the Sealing Squad did not withdraw immediately.
The last words Kakashi had left behind could not count as an agreement.
Nor had the Masked Man promised to preserve that page of the record.
Konoha could only continue monitoring the residual fluctuations while saving the Revealing Powder images it had already obtained in three separate copies.
Twelve hours later, the last Space Slot suddenly spat out a cluster of sparks.
The Anbu on watch immediately stepped back.
The Sealing Ninja did not put them out with water, but guided them into a transparent containment box.
Only half a sheet of paper was burning.
The flames crawled slowly along its edges but never reached the words in the center, as though someone had deliberately controlled how far they could burn.
Once the chakra inside the box was drained, the flames went out.
There was no signature on the paper.
Only a single sentence.
"The copy only proves what he did. It doesn't prove my innocence."
Below it lay a passage taken as a rubbing from the Original Record.
The rubbing had not been made with ink.
Instead, it consisted of pale gray marks left by spatial compression.
The Masked Man had laid another thin sheet over the original and used his right eye to distort the fibers locally, making the indented strokes in the original show through the paper.
This method could not reproduce ink added later, nor could it fill in missing characters out of thin air.
What it preserved was the earliest layer written on the original.
The record began without a name.
Only "Candidate Number Thirteen."
The age, injuries, condition of the eyes, and timing at Kannabi Bridge all matched Obito.
The candidate assessment was