You’re mistaken Madara actually died. His izanagi revived him but it didn’t activate for a long time so Madara was actually dead Tobirama actually looked at a dead body. When he woke up and revived himself he used a shadow clone. A multi shadow clone jutsu this Jutsu is an S rank forbidden jutsu and no you cannot tell the original from fake.

Pretty sure the Byakugan couldn't tell apart the shadow clones from the original. Why would Tobirama be able to?

@Tim Xman What is there to be mistaken about? All the things you repeated is literally from the highlighted texts. The plot hole is how Tobirama who came back to study his dead body again did not notice its been swapped by a shadow clone. A chakra duplicate should not be able to mimic a rotting corpse and will eventually burst into smoke once it gets cut open

His critical mistake was delaying the removal of Madara's Sharingan before the time delay izanagi could activate. Security oversight was not tagging a permanent hiraishin mark on the corpse right away before he hid it to prevent potential theft as Zetsu said it was valuable to other shinobi

@IKTime this has to be ragebait. You think a hyuga genin couldn’t tell whether a moving person from a distance is a clone = kage level sensor who knows everything there is to shadow clones couldn’t tell a still corpse was a "dead" clone. He’s gonna perform autopsy anyways and it’ll go poof

It's not even just Neji's Byakugan. Pain's Rinnegan and Kaguya's Byakugan couldn't tell either.

You’re forgetting that even if he did try something, Hashirama would have stopped him or forced him to remove any hirashin tags. Tobirama is a brave man, but he’s always backed down when Hashirama gets serious towards him.

@IKTime None of those examples tried to play dead. They would have to be blind to not sus out a fresh looking corpse when its supposed to decompose

@Yoshua Z.O The fact that he had hidden Madara's body so he could learn more about sharingan automatically means he did this behind his brother's back and would do so again if he had set up a hiraishin tag.

Pulling the Hashirama card to cover shitty writing doesn’t work this time

I can logically pull the Hashirama card cause the text clearly states he studied the body, then stopped short of destroying it, THEN hid it. So there is reason to assume Hashirama did find out, and forced him to stop and to not put any hiraishin tags on.