Land of Rice Fields.
In a dimly lit underground palace, Orochimaru stood quietly before a row of large nutrient tanks, staring blankly at a figure floating inside one of them.
After a long while, the corners of his mouth curled up slightly. He stuck out his tongue and licked his lips. "How truly exciting!"
The figure in the large nutrient tank before him was his latest experimental result: a replicated human possessing his and Kabuto's cellular tissue, produced through conventional gestation.
This was different from Hyuga Kagami's clones.
The clones cultivated by Hyuga Kagami were the products of cellular fusion, not life born through conventional gestation. Thus, they were merely empty shells without souls or thoughts.
What Orochimaru had cultivated, however, was more accurately described as a modified human than a clone.
This was a new life that truly possessed a soul and independent thoughts. It simply carried Orochimaru's and Yakushi Kabuto's genetic information within its body, making it, in a sense, the child of Orochimaru and Yakushi Kabuto.
For that reason, this new life's hair color closely resembled Yakushi Kabuto's—a grayish white with a hint of blue—while its pupils were amber, just like Orochimaru's.
Of course, none of that was why Orochimaru was looking forward to it.
What truly excited Orochimaru was that, unlike the previous failed specimens, this new life had almost perfectly inherited his chakra nature. It had possessed an enormous amount of chakra far beyond that of ordinary people from birth, and had displayed an extremely high affinity for natural energy.
It was equivalent to this new life possessing the strengths of both Orochimaru and Kabuto.
Whether it was Orochimaru or Yakushi Kabuto, either one alone could be considered an outstanding figure in the Ninja World. One could easily imagine the immense potential of a new