Everything went smoothly. After Qian left the Hokage Building, he kept Ame no Minaka active and slipped along in stealth, soon returning home.
Nothing unexpected happened along the way.
And the moment he got home, the first thing he did was replace his Shadow Clone.
Qian knew that everything he had done was far from perfect.
But it was the same old point: as long as there was no concrete evidence, then even if he was suspicious, the village could not do anything to him.
After all, he was not some rootless civilian Low or Mid-Ranked Ninja the village could push around however it liked.
Whether it was his own overwhelming strength or his status as a ninja of the Uchiha clan, one of Leaf's great houses, both were enough to make the village reason with him.
And with the four Anbu ninja outside as witnesses, he was not afraid of reasoning things out.
Because of that, Qian was not particularly worried about his situation.
Next, it depended on whether Orochimaru could escape.
Qian felt the odds were fairly high.
For no other reason than that when he saw Namikaze Minato, Sarutobi Hiruzen, and the others appear on the third floor's Secret Archive almost at the same time, Qian knew that Namikaze Minato had been held up inside the Hokage Building by Sarutobi Hiruzen and the others, just as he had predicted.
And without Namikaze Minato, a Kage-level expert, holding the line, the Leaf ninjas outside alone could not possibly stop Orochimaru.
So the chances of him escaping were extremely high.
Standing on the roof of his house, Qian gazed toward the forest east of the village, feeling the increasingly violent Chakra fluctuations coming from that direction, his expression indescribably calm.
Time passed, second by second.
At a certain moment,