"How do you know my father?" Shino asked.
"Hm?" the beekeeper didn't seem interested, as he corked a jar of honey wine for his guest. "Oh, that. That's a long story we don't have time for. Some other time. Until then, here's the best of my honey wine for you. A peace offering, for all the trouble I caused."
"Thanks so much," Shino told the beekeeper, taking the honey wine jar from his hands. "How much do I owe you?"
The beekeeper stood dumbfound over his beehives, full of fermenting honey and rainwater collecting in bamboo nets.
"Money?" he asked, confused. "That's not how we run things in this village. Money means nothing to us here. Just take what you want."
"We?" Shino asked, stunned, scanning the dark fog around him.
Who were the other villagers? Besides Shino and the beekeeper, no one else seemed to be running this silent, isolated misty village.
Something was off, and Shino wondered again if staying the night here was asking for trouble.
"I need to find Kiba," he said. "If you could just point me toward the road back, I'd be very grateful."
The beekeeper stood silently facing him, his emotions unreadable behind his beekeeping mask.
"There is no road back for you," he finally admitted. "You will stay with us."
"What do you mean us?" Shino asked, confused. "Where are the others?"
"Here with you and me," the beekeeper answered vaguely. "Lost, like you and me."
"But you can't be both here and lost at the same time," Shino pointed out the contradiction.
"I don't know how you got here. But you will never leave this place again. This bamboo grove is surrounded by something like a barrier. Once you step inside, there is no way back out. Try to leave and you'll only continue to wander through an endless fog. That's what this jutsu does."
"That's impossible," Shino said. "You really mean there's no way out?"
"The way you came here no longer matters. The way you'll get out doesn't matter either. There is no past or future for you anymore," the beekeeper said. "This fog is your home now. You're here to stay."
But how could that be? Was he a prisoner here, or did the beekeeper really think this jutsu couldn't be broken?
"Nothing is that absolute. Any jutsu can be broken," Shino replied. "If there was a way in, there's got to be a way out."
And Shino was determined to find it, running into the fog to retrace the path he left Kiba on.
But the fog was deceiving.
No matter what direction Shino took in the bamboo grove, he ended up right back where he started with the beekeeper.
Refusing to accept the beekeeper's damnation, Shino tucked the honeywine gourd safely under his arm, and stubbornly charged into the fog again.
"Scatter," he commanded his bugs to swarm out into the fog. "Kiba can't be that far off...Why hasn't he come looking for me yet?"
Of all the times to be forgotten by his teammates, did it have to be this one?
Almost instantly, his bugs darted back out of the gray haze, swarming around him dazed and disoriented like a stormy night hurricane.
None of them could sense Kiba, or the way back to the Sora-Ku forest.
"An unbreakable jutsu, huh? That's not possible," Shino thought. "That's because every Jutsu has a weakness. This one can't be any different...That beekeeper is hiding something...But why would he want to keep me trapped here?...I have to find a way out."
Kneeling on one knee, Shino touched his five fingers to the ground, "Ninja Art, Insect Summoning Jutsu."
If his bugs couldn't map the bamboo grove through the fog, maybe the local insects in the grove could tell him how to get out.
Within minutes, an army of mites, aphids, Mealy Bugs, and ants came crawling from all sides of the bamboo grove to meet Shino in his summoning circle.
Nothing.
None of them could give him any answers. Instead, they all echoed the same report back to him,
"There's no way out." "No sign of Kiba." "No path to the forest." "No way out."
"If I can't track Kiba," Shino analyzed, sending one of his female beetles into the fog this time. "Then maybe by retracking my own footsteps, I'll know what direction the forest is."
But realizing that the only trace left of Shino in this grove was Shino himself, his female kikaichū immediately darted back to her master, and the males came flying back too.
"Maybe it's a good thing Kiba isn't here," Shino remarked. "He'd never shut up about this."
Because the irony couldn't be missed.
Finding things was Shino's specialty as a ninja. How could he now be the one needing finding?
"How is this possible?" Shino reassessed the fog's contradicting nature again. "How can this place be both a container and still infinite? What kind of jutsu is this?"
Thinking that his next move should be finding a weakness in the barrier, Shino scattered some of his scout bugs to the treetops above him.
"None of this makes sense. I got separated from Kiba a day ago. Hasn't he noticed I'm not there anymore? Unless time is different in here too. One day in this jutsu could be just seconds out there in the real world," Shino thought.
And then his stomach sank deeper when he realized how many days it would actually take locked in this jutsu before anyone remembered he was missing.
Would anyone even realize he hadn't made it to the wedding?
"How am I going to explain all this to Hinata?"