“Hey Shino, let’s hurry up and go out to buy it!”
Kiba was in high spirits, but Shino never remembered seeing honey wine around the village.
“Is such a thing sold?” Shino murmured, “I’m hearing about it for the first time in my life…”
Kurenai easily answered, “It isn’t sold.”
“Huh?” Kiba let out an idiotic sounding voice at Kurenai’s comment.
“If it was being sold, I’d have bought it already. That stuff is really rare to find in our village.”
“Uhm…the-tehn what do we do?!”
“That legendary honey wine is something that I only got to taste once, many years ago. That’s all that I can say.”
“Oh no…”
Kiba’s face looked like the end of the world was coming. In fact, Shino thought he looked worse than he had when the moon had been falling. Kiba really had an endless range of facial expressions, Shino thought as he stoically watched.
“The honey wine that I drank was given to me by a travelling merchant. It really delicious, so I asked him where it came from. I was thinking of going and buying it too. And, what do you think he said as a reply?” Kurenai paused, her face turning grim. “He said he bought it in the Soraku.”
“You mean those black market guys…?!”
Soraku…a group of renegades unreachable by any country or village. People said the village itself looked like a perfectly normal place nobody would glance at, but in fact was the hometown of a clan of black marketers. It was a place nobody heard good rumours about, the kind that got their hands on hard-to-find weapons that had been banned everywhere else.
“To be more accurate, the merchant said that he’d gotten the honey wine from a beekeeper who lived in Soraku.”