Danzō remained silent after Setsu finished her report and analysis.
She had clearly nothing more to add.
His mind had already moved on to the more useful part.
Interpretation.
The entire purpose of the exchange had been to estimate Fugaku Uchiha's ceiling.
For an Uchiha, the Sharingan and the spiritual response surrounding it could reveal most of what Danzō wanted to know.
How dangerous was the boy, now just turned adult and stepping into power for the first time, likely to become?
Could he be controlled?
Does he need to be manipulated?
Would he eventually need to be removed?
The opportunity had been unusually convenient.
A jurisdiction dispute.
A young captain with something to prove.
Masked shinobi refusing to identify themselves.
Even the resulting violence could be explained without exposing anything important.
Fugaku had stepped forward.
The operative had interpreted it as the beginning of an attack and responded first.
An unfortunate misunderstanding between two Konoha organizations.
Danzō had already presented essentially that version to Hiruzen.
The Hokage could relay it to the inevitably furious Uchiha patriarch.
Whether he accepted it was another matter.
Acceptance was not strictly necessary.
Danzō still did not know whether Fugaku had awakened.
The last information reaching Root was that he remained unconscious after being carried away by his men.
The immediate situation at the warehouse had been contained quickly.
Once Fugaku collapsed, the forward operative finally identified himself as acting under Root authority and claimed he had believed Fugaku was about to attack.
The four Uchiha officers had reacted badly.
Predictably.
Anger came first.
Then confusion.
And underneath both, embarrassment.
Their captain had stepped forward against an unidentified obstruction and been dropped almost immediately.
Yet whatever anger they felt had been overtaken by a more immediate concern.
Fugaku was not merely their captain.
He was the Police Chief's son.
The expected future patriarch.
Seeing him unconscious on the floor had changed their priorities very quickly.
They had thrown out several threats about reports, consequences, and the matter reaching the Chief before taking Fugaku and withdrawing.
Reasonable.
From their perspective.
Convenient from Danzō's.
Even if Fugaku later realized that something more than the physical strike had affected him, proving it would be another matter entirely.
There would be no admission that Mu had been present.
No record connecting a Yamanaka technique to the incident.
And Hiruzen had known the purpose of the test in advance.
Danzō doubted the Hokage would feel compelled to offer anything beyond whatever carefully phrased verbal concession became useful for calming the Uchiha.
Certainly nothing substantial.
That assumed Fugaku recovered normally.
If complications emerged, someone might eventually have to pay for the incident.
Danzō knew exactly who that would be.
Not Hiruzen.
Not himself.
Not even his best tool "Mu".
The forward operative who landed the physical blow could be reprimanded, reassigned, or sacrificed politically if necessary.
That was one of the advantages of hierarchy.
The Uchiha could make noise.
They could appeal to procedure.
They could invoke village harmony, jurisdiction, reputation, and the danger of allowing unidentified shinobi to obstruct the Military Police.
What they lacked was enough power over the Hokage's faction to force truly serious concessions.
Danzō leaned back slightly.
Despite the unexpected result, he considered the test useful.
Perhaps even successful.
The simplest explanation remained that Fugaku Uchiha was simply weaker than expected.
Danzō found himself reconsidering some of the reports surrounding the boy entirely.
Had Fugaku even awakened the Sharingan?
The assumption was common inside the clan.
Outside it, direct confirmation was more limited.
And if he had awakened it, Danzō now doubted it could be particularly advanced.
One tomoe, perhaps.
Anything greater sat poorly beside what Mu had just described.
An Uchiha with a developed Sharingan should not normally possess such poor spiritual resistance.
Unless the boy suffered from some unusual defect of his own.
That possibility remained.
The problem was that souls were still poorly understood even by shinobi standards.
The physical body could be mapped.
Organs identified.
Chakra pathways studied.
Medical ninjutsu had accumulated generations of practical knowledge about injury, tissue, blood, nerves, and recovery.
The soul was different.
No comparable anatomical chart existed.
No comprehensive body of knowledge could tell Danzō what an abnormal spiritual structure was supposed to look like.
And if Mu herself could not classify what happened, there were very few people in Konoha likely to do better.
Setsu was probably one of the village's foremost experts in spiritual interference.
The other obvious name was Dan Katō.
Unlike Mu, Dan's talent was public.
His Spirit Transformation Technique had already earned him considerable attention among Konoha's shinobi despite his relatively young age.
Setsu was better hidden.
Danzō preferred it that way.
For now, the most practical classification remained simple.
Poor resistance to advanced mental interference.
Possibly promoted too quickly because he was the patriarch's son.
Future threat assessment lowered.
The Uchiha might even have exaggerated their heir's talent deliberately.
Clans did that.
Reputation had value.
A supposedly exceptional successor helped project stability, especially when outsiders rarely received opportunities to test the claim directly.
Danzō did not accept that conclusion blindly.
He rarely accepted anything blindly.
There were other observers.
Mu had not been the only sensor near the warehouse.
Two Root operatives had stood directly in front of Fugaku and his officers.
Their accounts broadly matched hers.
Mu's report was simply far more useful because she possessed the expertise to interpret the spiritual side of the exchange.
Danzō had also considered the less comfortable possibility.
Deception.
Suppose Fugaku had somehow recognized what was happening.
Suppose his actual ability greatly exceeded every report Root possessed.
Suppose he already understood the degree to which the Hokage's faction watched the Uchiha and deliberately chose to appear weak.
Then the entire collapse could theoretically have been an act.
Danzō always considered the possibility that another person might be as calculating as he was.
The theory had one severe problem.
Mechanics.
Faking the entire sequence would have been extraordinarily difficult.
Fugaku would have needed to recognize a concealed spiritual intrusion almost instantly, coordinate his physical reaction with the forward operative's strike, manipulate what Mu herself perceived, fool an additional sensor, deceive two observers at close range, and then convincingly allow himself to suffer a genuine head impact.
Possible did not mean plausible.
There was also the more troubling alternative.
Mu could have lied.
Not about everything.
Perhaps only enough to conceal what truly happened.
Danzō could never dismiss that possibility completely with anyone.
Even her.
But Setsu's life inside Root had been monitored from the moment she entered it.
Her assignments.
Her contacts.
Her movements.
Her access.
Danzō was confident she had never previously met Fugaku in any meaningful capacity.
For two people with no established contact to spontaneously coordinate such an elaborate deception during their first encounter, while simultaneously fooling multiple observers, stretched probability too far.
So Danzō returned to the simplest explanation.
Fugaku Uchiha had been overestimated.
And for whatever reason, he possessed a particular vulnerability to spiritual interference.
What happened next would determine whether that assessment needed revision.
Perhaps he would awaken normally.
Perhaps the strange reaction Mu described would disappear as nothing more than an unusual response to trauma.
Perhaps the boy would recover and, after experiencing the weakness directly, find some way to compensate for it.
That possibility mattered more.
For now, though, the Uchiha response remained controlled.
Angry, certainly.
But not panicked enough to suggest Fugaku's condition had become immediately life-threatening.
That was sufficient.
Root would continue watching him in the future.
Just not closely enough to waste resources that belonged elsewhere.
Fugaku Uchiha remained a person of interest.
He had simply moved lower on Danzō's list of urgent concerns.
...
"And even if you have thoughts of your own... Perhaps, soon enough, they will stop mattering."
The thought came to Danzō as his gaze settled on Setsu, still kneeling rigidly before his desk.
Her posture remained perfect.
So did the rest of her.
That had never been enough to make him trust her completely.
In truth, Danzō had never fully trusted any of Root's first generation.
Not Setsu.
Not the other clan talents brought into the organization during its earliest years.
He had broken habits, severed attachments where possible, imposed discipline, obedience, isolation, conditioning.
Much of it had worked.
But there was a difference between reshaping someone and creating them properly from the beginning.
The first generation had already possessed "identities" when they came to him.
Memories of ordinary life.
Preferences.
Loyalties formed before Root.
No amount of later conditioning could make that entirely equivalent to the children now coming of age beneath his organization.
Those were different.
Danzō had molded many of them before they properly understood what independence even meant.
That was far more reliable.
But fifteen years ago, he had not possessed that luxury.
Tobirama was dead.
Hiruzen had become the Third Hokage.
A decision Danzō had resented from the moment it was made.
Yet Hiruzen, perhaps understanding perfectly well how dangerous that resentment could become, had been unexpectedly "generous" afterward.
A new organization.
Unofficial enough to operate without the burdens placed upon ordinary village institutions.
Its purpose was simple.
Counterintelligence.
Internal security.
Foreign infiltration.
Sabotage.
Political suppression where necessary.
Operations whose existence Konoha could deny while still benefiting from the result.
The village already possessed ANBU.
Root would work beneath even that.
Danzō had been given command.
It was not the Hokage's seat.
But it was power.
Real power.
And Danzō understood enough to recognize that immediately.
The problem was that Root had begun as little more than authority without infrastructure.
He needed personnel.
Money.
Facilities.
Networks.
He needed all of it quickly.
So he used what already belonged to him.
The Shimura clan.
By then Danzō had "inherited" leadership of the clan naturally, and under his direction its purpose changed considerably.
The Shimura had never been among Konoha's great clans.
Respectable.
Established.
Useful.
Nothing more.
That was not enough.
With Hiruzen's protection and the freedoms attached to Root, Danzō began turning the clan into something far more profitable.
Government contracts.
Preferred suppliers.
Front businesses.
Smuggling when official channels became inconvenient.
Connections to men who preferred not to explain where their money came from.
The distinction between legitimate influence, political favoritism, and the underworld outside of Konoha became increasingly unimportant.
Danzō cared about results.
The clan funded Root.
Root strengthened Danzō.
Danzō's position strengthened the clan.
A simple cycle.
The strongest Shimura shinobi became the first core of the organization, experienced men he already understood and could rely upon while everything else was built around them.
But Shimura manpower alone was not enough.
Root needed talent immediately.
And fifteen years ago, there was only one practical place to obtain it.
The clans.
Konoha's civilian population could produce exceptional shinobi, certainly, but finding enough of them quickly was impossible.
The clans had already done the work.
They had bloodlines.
Training systems.
Secret techniques.
Children raised from birth to become shinobi.
So Danzō took the best available material.
Not infants.
Not yet.
That would solve the future problem, not the immediate one.
He needed operatives who could become useful quickly.
Ten to twenty was the ideal range.
Young enough to be separated from most attachments.
Old enough to have already received serious clan training.
Anything younger required years of investment before becoming operational.
Anything much older usually came with spouses, children, reputations, friendships, and loyalties too deeply rooted to remove cleanly.
So the clans were told to contribute.
Officially, selected talents had received special assignments in service of Konoha.
In practice, Danzō chose promising young shinobi and the clans surrendered them.
Hiruzen's authority stood behind the arrangement.
That was what mattered.
Not every clan submitted equally easily or to the same extent, depending on their strength and connection with Hiruzen.
But most understood where power sat.
The arrangement had another advantage.
Techniques.
A clan might spend hundreds of years developing a secret art.
Then spend ten or fifteen years training one exceptional child to use it properly.
And once that child entered Root, Danzō became their highest authority.
Their secrets came with them.
That was perhaps the most amusing part.
The clan retained the name.
Root received the product.
Years of training, inherited knowledge, specialized methods, all placed into the hands of an operative whose obedience now belonged elsewhere.
A sanctioned seizure without ever needing to call it one.
Clan heads understood exactly what was happening.
Their expressions when handing over their brightest young shinobi had made that obvious.
They still did it.
That was power.
Danzō had never been foolish enough to hoard everything for himself, either.
Hiruzen had made Root possible.
Hiruzen needed to benefit from it.
So useful techniques were documented.
Refined where possible.
Then copied into the Hokage's expanding restricted archives under the convenient justification of preserving knowledge for the village.
For Konoha.
Always for Konoha.
Hiruzen had gained access to an extraordinary range of methods that way.
Danzō knew perfectly well where much of the Third Hokage's reputation for understanding nearly every style in the village had come from.
Not solely talent.
Access.
Authority.
The ability to make other people's knowledge become yours.
That, too, was power.
But the first generation had always been temporary.
Useful.
Necessary.
Never ideal.
Danzō's real solution had come afterward.
Children.
Orphans at first.
Then children identified through wider networks.
Young enough to enter Root before family, clan, or village identity could properly settle.
Young enough for obedience to become normal rather than imposed.
Young enough that Root itself could become their first meaningful structure.
Those children were no longer children now.
The oldest were approaching fifteen.
Many were already more than operational.
And they were everything Danzō had expected.
More disciplined.
Less sentimental.
More dependent on the organization.
Often more talented than average Shimura clansmen.
Which meant the old arrangement was beginning to end.
More Shimura veterans could return to clan affairs or help manage Root's underworld, intelligence, and commercial interests outside more passively.
Their places inside Root would be taken by operatives raised entirely beneath Danzō's system.