A huge thank you to all of my readers, reviewers, and people who've put this story on 'story alert', which is quite a few of you. Here's the newest chapter, and I think it may shock some of you. Also, to all of you who are asking where the ShinoSaku action is, please be patient. It's coming very soon!

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Sakura geared up to move the fountain as gently as she could away from the opening. It looked very heavy, maybe 1,000 pounds, but she didn't want to break it…just yet. Otherwise the Aburame might not look too kindly upon her in the future. Come to think of it, the only Aburame she'd ever seen in the village was Shino. She had an absurd thought then. What if he had murdered his whole clan, just like Sas- er… Uchiha Itachi did! And now he was the only one left!

'That's just stupid. I'm sure I would've smelled blood by now…' Sakura glanced around uneasily, then resumed her task. Besides, Shino would never do such a crazy thing. And he'd always seemed sane to her.

'Yeah, so did Uchiha Itachi when you went over to the Uchiha compound to play with Sasuke.'

'Hey! Itachi was a very good liar. He was a prodigy too.'

'That's not to say Shino isn't a very good liar. Though prodigy I doubt. And for all you know, Uchiha Itachi is still alive and kicking. Don't say 'was' if you don't know if he's dead.'

'The hell? What do I care?'

'I'm just saying is all.'

'Well knock it off. I'm trying to concentrate.'

'As you wish, master.'

'There's no need to be cheeky.'

Sakura used all of her deadly might to gently push the fountain away from whatever it was hiding. She hoped the whole clan or at least their leader was down there… not Shino conducting mad scientific experiments. Painfully bright light and enormous amounts of raw, powerful chakra were kinda concerning on their own, not in the least bit because they could denote insanity.

After a few minutes of nudging the fountain this way and that, it was still not budging.

To calm herself down, Sakura sat and proceeded to perform some meditative poses that Shizune had taught her. Shizune promised her that it would work better than hitting something, or somebody. Well… it wasn't working now.

Frustrated and annoyed, Sakura did the only thing she could in this type of situation. She punched the ground. Violently.

The fountain creaked.

For a second, Sakura was afraid that she had cracked it up the middle, and when it creaked again, she rose to her feet swiftly and braced her hands and feet against the column of granite.

'Oh, please, please, please don't break in half! I swear I'll never punch anyone ever again if you don't crack in half! Oh, please!' Sakura repeated over and over again in her mind, willing the fountain to steady itself.

It creaked again, and Sakura realized it was moving away from her. She was about to rush over to the other side of the fountain and hold it from that end, but then she noticed something else. Something that made her release the breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding. Something that filled her up with bubbles of relief. The fountain wasn't about to fall over and die, it was just sliding across the opening to the light!

'Miracle of miracles,' Sakura grinned and kissed both of her knuckles, 'Violence solves everything!'

And indeed that might have been the case, had Sakura then not seen a tiny knot of bark in the ground that she had punched and was the button that moved the lever that moved the mechanisms of the fountain to uncover the secret underground tunnels of the Aburame clan.

Sakura reluctantly retracted her previous thought and waited for the fountain to totally uncover the opening. Once it did, the light dimmed, and she was staring in the face of the deepest, darkest hole she'd ever seen to date.

Of course, that was only an illusion, since the blackness was yet another covering to the aquamarine light that wasn't being hidden very well by all of these tarps. Maybe it really was a trap?

'No,' Sakura shook her head. 'This light obviously signifies that the Aburame have a secret underground chamber that Tsunade-shishou apparently doesn't know about. It's not a trap.'

She then tried to remove the black covering, but was surprised when her hand passed right through it. 'Strange…' Sakura thought. She let her hand and then arm sink deeper into the blackness, and she was almost up to her shoulder when she decided she wouldn't get to the bottom of this (literally) if she didn't go into the opening. She sat back on her haunches and thought. She didn't want to return to Tsunade-shishou with the scroll in hand and she didn't know how to summon a messenger, not to mention that this missive was very important to an influential clan. Besides, it would be embarrassing in both of those situations to explain that she was a bit scared of black holes, and she wanted to be able to keep her head up in Konoha. There was nothing for it but to go forward.

'And so down into the rabbit hole I go…' Sakura sucked in a breath and let it out slowly. The white light was still shining on the edges of the murky blackness, so she supposed there was light down there somewhere. And where there was light, there were people…? Yes.

Sakura plunged in.

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There was an odd feeling of weightlessness in her limbs and she felt as though she was upside-down and floating backwards. She opened her eyes but apparently they were already open, as all she could see was drenched in blackness. She brought her hand up to her face and was relieved when she could make out the outline of it. She was awake. Now where was she going? The black tide seemed to be carrying her without propulsion somewhere. She was flowing down a waterless river towards who knows where. And oddly, with her senses subdued, she found she was fine with whatever the blackness wanted to do with her.

She let her hands skim the blackness and touched nothing. Nodding lazily to herself, she rolled lethargically over to her stomach, and this felt like she was right-side up. Not that she could tell of course. The surrounding darkness made everything intangible.

Now that she was facing forwards (the direction the darkness was carrying her in) and was right-side up, she could see a ring of light in the distance. And the blackness must have been moving her forward quickly, because the light was growing swiftly larger. Then something snapped her out of her stupor.

Humming. Tinny humming, sounding louder and louder with every passing second. She was approaching the ring of light very fast, but the humming, once it reached a certain plateau, stayed constant in loudness. A few feet away from the light, Sakura realized what the blackness was. Insects. Millions upon millions of insects were carrying her to… it didn't matter! They must have dulled her senses for some time because they thought she was an enemy and were planning to carry her to their masters… but now did they realize she had no ill intent? How? Maybe, like horses, they could sense human emotions very accurately? Never mind.

Sakura struggled to remain calm. She didn't like insects. No, 'didn't like' was too soft a description. She detested bugs. Strongly detested bugs. She tried to keep her mind off of the creepy crawlies holding her until they delivered her into the ring of light. If she freaked out now, who knows what the kikaichu would do to her?

In the longest ten seconds of Sakura's life, she managed to keep her cool until the insects deposited her through the ring of light. Well, deposited wasn't the right word. It was more like, the bugs ejected her through the ring of light. And what she went through turned out to be a sort of curtain. She felt the smooth texture of silk as she flew through the air and landed bottom-first on a bed of hard rock. The kikaichu must have sensed her fear. Thankfully, they weren't swarming on her now to eat her.

Sakura stood up, wincing at her sore bottom. The feeling would go away in no time at all, but for the moment it stung. She looked around for the channel in which she had been carried by the bugs. It wasn't on any of the walls. Maybe it disappeared once someone went through it? This caused her a moment of panic before she reasoned she could just ask one of the Aburame if he could show her out. If there were any Aburame down here. Glancing around the underground chamber did not assuage her worries about them. But if this was the source of the powerful chakra, then there had to be people down here. Kikaichu alone could not generate that much chakra. She had learned from the report that they manufactured their own chakra that was very dissimilar from a human's.

She started when she heard the buzzing again. It was coming from above. So, instinctively, she looked up. Oh. And there was the hole, oozing out the blackness, the bugs. So it had been in the ceiling. Okay… well, at least now she could get out in a hurry if she needed to. Providing that the kikaichu would allow her to.

There was another, larger hole in the wall directly in front of where she was standing. Since there were no other apparent pathways that most likely led deep into the heart of whatever this place was, Sakura began walking into the hewn 'doorway' of what she decided to call 'the caves system'.

As she walked, she pondered. She knew that the military intelligence branch of Konoha's government used underground tunnels and chambers, but those were mostly for holding very dangerous criminals and using brutal methods of interrogation. Also, those tunnels, (she had seen them in pictures) were hemmed in on all sides by solid iron walls. These tunnels had nothing between them and the earth that surrounded them. Sakura skimmed one side of the tunnel with her hand as she went along. The material was hard-packed and oddly cool, though there were torches every few yards lighting the path and providing warmth to what otherwise would be a freezing tunnel. Her worries about being crushed by the tons of earth above her lessened, but her face wore a perpetual frown the whole length of her walk. She had yet to encounter anyone.

Thankfully, there seemed to be no kikaichu flying around the tunnel. And if there were, she was glad she couldn't detect or see them. Then she spotted something that she had been looking for the hours she had wasted in the Aburame compound: a person.

She sped up and called to him…or her, she was too far away to see the gender of the person, when she noticed something odd. The torches along the walls were growing dimmer the farther she went into the caves. And there was a thin sheen of water on the walls now. Had she unknowingly been traveling deeper into the earth? Sakura stopped mid-step and turned around. If she had gone down into the earth, she wouldn't be able to see the entrance which she had come through. If she had stayed on a level path, she would be very able to see the ring of light marking the doorway.

She couldn't see the entrance. She looked back to the person, who was standing quite still and seemed not to have acknowledged her in the slightest. Her eyebrows rose, and she waffled between going back the way she came to see if she could spy the entrance again, or walking further down the gently sloping pathway to ask the person where she could find the clan leader. Sakura thought, then, frustrated, dug a coin out of her pocket.

'Heads I continue, tails I turn back,' she said in her mind. She flipped the coin into the air, and it came back in her hand as heads. Curse the practice of flippism.

'Towards that creepy guy-whoever it is-I go then,' she thought. And so, stuffing the coin back into her pocket, she advanced upon the Aburame.

She crossed the space between them in no time at all.

"Hello, maybe you can help me. I'm looking for your clan leader, Aburame Shindoh." Sakura smiled in what she imagined was a pleasant way to the person, who she could now see was a male.

The man didn't say anything.

"Sir?" Sakura stepped closer to him.

The man was wearing the same clothes Shino usually wore. A dark grey hood was pulled low over his face, while his heavy grey jacket concealed his body from his thighs to his nose. His eyes were covered by those odd blue-blocker glasses. Not even his toes were visible.

"Um… excuse me?" Sakura said, her patience wearing thin. "Hey, buddy, I'm talking to you! The least you could do is look at me!"

She bared her teeth at him, a scowl mussing her smile. The man did nothing. She couldn't take any more of this mockery.

Sakura shoved the guy's shoulder hard, pushing half of his body against the wall. This was sort of hard to do, because for some reason he was very heavy… like, weighted down. She thought for a moment on why this was. And then the buzzing started.

She whipped her head back and forth as the buzzing rose up like a spitting lion-cat, incensed and ready to converge on its prey. Then she realized something: the buzzing was coming from inside the man's body. And his body was starting to leak out black ooze… bugs.

"Oh my gods," Sakura whispered on a breathless rush of air that felt as if it were being squeezed from her lungs.

The cloud of the kikaichu emptied out of the body, leaving it as no more than a pile of…skin… on the cold cavern floor. The entire colony hovered in the air for a moment, buzzing angrily. Sakura stood frozen. She couldn't feel her arms. She couldn't move her legs. Her stomach was replaced by a balloon full of tingling adrenaline.

Then the kikaichu shot backwards on a curve and she had a split second to release a breath of relief before they came straight back down to earth. Right towards her.

The balloon in her tummy burst and she felt a mad rush of life-saving energy fill her from the tips of her toes to the tip of her nose.

And so she ran.

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Oh... another cliffhanger? Oh yeah. Well, let's see... next update comes in a few days! Review if you want the action speeded up, story alert if you want to keep the action slow and steady. Who will win the race? Mwaaaahaaaa. :D