Yin Jie could not help applauding Orochimaru in his heart once again.
Despite lacking several crucial pieces of information, Orochimaru's guess had actually come very close to the truth.
However, to be precise, the Three-Tomoe Sharingan—even one developed to its utmost limit—was still not on equal footing with Hashirama Cells.
After all, Orochimaru still did not know that beyond the Three-Tomoe Sharingan lay two further stages: the Mangekyō Sharingan and the Eternal Mangekyō Sharingan.
A week had already passed since Yin Jie entered the barrier.
Neither he nor Orochimaru had expected that merely fusing with the weakened version of Hashirama Cells would take so long.
However, the Uchiha Clan and Yin Jie's companions simply assumed that he had left the village on another mission, so none of them had any particular reaction.
But the Third Hokage, Hiruzen Sarutobi, was different.
After discovering that Yin Jie had entered the barrier and still had not emerged after an entire day, the two ANBU ninja Hiruzen Sarutobi had sent to "watch" Orochimaru finally realized something was wrong.
After all, whenever Yin Jie had come to Orochimaru before, he had stayed for half a day at most before leaving. He had never once remained inside for an entire day like this.
Thus, the two ANBU ninja immediately reported the matter to Hiruzen Sarutobi.
At first, however, Hiruzen Sarutobi did not think it was a major problem. He merely assumed Yin Jie was assisting Orochimaru, his teacher, with some particularly time-consuming experiment.
After all, while the Sharingan was not as useful for experiments as the Byakugan, which possessed x-ray vision, its ability to clearly see the flow of chakra was still an enormous aid during experiments.
Moreover, in his view, Orochimaru, having already been warned by him, would not dare take such a tremendous