When Konan brought back the two orders, torrential rain had been falling over the Land of Rain for three straight days.
The paper had not gotten damp.
The underlying order was wrapped in the Masked Man's space chakra.
The surface order was covered in a water-repellent Black Membrane.
They used the same Message Tubes and passed through the same double verification, yet demanded that the Akatsuki take completely opposite actions.
The first order called for suspending all transfers of supplies related to tailed beasts.
The source of every White Zetsu deployment had to be checked again.
Containers connected to the Demonic Statue of the Outer Path were to be sealed away temporarily.
The second order called for immediately sending medicine, sealing containers, and peripheral personnel to the Demonic Statue's base.
The tailed beast chakra already in their possession could not wait.
Any objection would be considered a betrayal of Madara's final wishes.
Konan did not identify the first order as the Masked Man's based on handwriting alone.
She took out the sealed edges left by his last three spatial message deliveries and compared the direction in which each vortex had contracted.
The Masked Man habitually secured the upper-right corner first, then drew the paper counterclockwise into the other dimension.
The underlying order retained that same sequence, and the intervals between contractions also matched the recent condition of his right eye.
The black covering, however, had spread outward from the center of the paper.
It had copied the result of the space chakra, not the process of casting it.
That increased the likelihood that the first order came from the Masked Man.
It still could not prove that Konoha had not taken control of him, only that the order had indeed passed through his right eye.
Nagato did not begin by