I have mice and lizards now. Not big lizards, they only seem to be here to eat the mice, and the mice only seem to be here to eat… everything really. Both of these are fantastic developments, and I do hope that Cytra can eat mice… they’d be such a good food source for her if I make her much bigger.

She’s the size of a dinner plate now, and if you were to spread all her legs out, she’d look more like those small carpets you find in bathrooms back home. Right… Home… Best not think about that.

Anyways, she’s quite big. Big enough that her venom should be enough to kill a human sized thing by sheer volume alone, if she can get a bite in. So how to I let her get that bite in?

Hmm…

Maybe bigger webs? Webs that can catch people and birds instead of insects and mice? Those would be rather obvious, just hanging around here, and they might impede my ecosystem a bit…

What if I made her stronger, and gave her… armor? If she could take a hit and deliver a bite in return, that could work. Though I’m not sure how to make a spider durable enough to withstand any sort of serious force.

Ambushing, then. I guide Cytra over to my tree, and have her climb up to a branch I grow for her as she climbs. Forcibly growing stuff with mana is costly, but very cool to look at. Right. Cytra, I will make you smarter… I’m not sure how much smarter. I think crow-level intelligence should be enough for now. Also, more adaptations to help her jump, run, camouflage, spin webs, and throw said webs. Maybe a tad bit more size. And- I’m out of blood mana.

Ok! That’s all for now, my dear. Rest up while the changes take hold.

My ants and wasps are starting up nicely, in fact, the ants making proper exploratory missions into the green sea seems to be what attracted the lizards and mice. The birds are back too, similarly, they seem to be here to eat the wasps when they go for the baitplants. Perfect. I think I need one more type of feeder/food relationship to really bring this all together. I don’t know the proper terms for it, sue me.

Oh, mosquito-beetle, you’ll do, I will make you large. Not particularly large, mind you, but large enough that it’d take three or four wasps or a significant ant army to take one down. You will be slow, ineffective at combating your predators, and utterly incapable of defending yourself from larger threats like birds and mice. However, I bless you with one virtue. A frankly ridiculous appetite and ludicrous reproductive rate.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

You will be the swarmbug, and you exist to convert the green sea plants into the fleshy sort of food as efficiently as possible. Do not fail your creator. Know that you are my most awful soldier fighting my worst battle.

I’m quite proud of the swarmbug. It only takes an hour of watching the for it to have laid well over three hundred eggs, forty of which were pilfered by mice, the original bug itself was eaten not long after, but there are now two hundred and forty baby swarmbugs, and twenty defects. The defects were consumed by the survivors, which I should have expected.

I mean, these things are pretty much just fodder for my more important stuff anyways. In anticipation that they might be so shit as to get wiped out in time, I scoop up batches of five to ten of them and just sort of scatter them around. By the time I’m done, I can see Cytra stirring in my periphery, time to check on my favorite spider.

She’s… Beautiful. Not in the traditional human sense, or even in the cute way anime monsters are, but in the majestic way. I don’t know if I let too much of my personal pun with her name influence her appearance, but she looks quite regal with the gold ‘crown’ of fuzz around her eyes and the silver fuzz on the rest of her body. Also… I think she can sense me looking at her, somehow, since she turned to face my remote viewing point exactly.

Is she… bowing? No, no, no, Cytra, dear, you misunderstand what it is I wanted you to be. I don’t want you to be some servant for me to discard or alter as I please. If I must, I don’t know if you can understand this when I poke you, but… Cytra does not serve. Heh. I’m an idiot.

Moving on from that embarrassment, I poke her to tell her to use her camo, which she does. Her… skin? Skin and fuzz, going with that, turn brown in the exact same shade, tone, and somehow texture of the wooden branch she’s sitting on. If I didn’t check where she was by her mana outlines, I’d totally miss her. Perfect.

I think I’m just gonna let her go on her way, as long as the druid or druids, god forbid, aren’t here yet, she should just be living her life. Though, I will point her in the direction of a mouse or two to see if she’ll go for it.

Oh. A bird just got caught in a baitplant bush, time to check if my theory with blood magic is correct.

Huh. The blood magic isn’t leaking out of the bird, that’s not why I’m confused, but the bird is… dying far faster than the thorns would suggest- The thorns, right, this is my highly strange baitplant here, it wouldn’t surprise me if the mutant part of mana mutant gave the thorns a bit of poison of whatever flavor the berries are.

This bird appears to have been a bit too overenthusiastic about chasing a bug of some type, and got its wings stuck in the thorns. Incredibly unfortunate, but you’ll be dying in seconds, it looks like, so I’ll get some good intel off of you.

I’m the good guy, I’m the good guy, I’m the good-

That’s interesting. The blood mana only started flowing out of the bird when it died, and didn’t match its actual blood at all. More interesting still, and I’m sure I could’ve figured this out earlier if I’d been paying attention, roughly a quarter of the bird’s mana seems to absorb into the baitplant rather than begin its journey towards me.

That explains how Cytra seems to survive off of the stuff she kills, without ever eating much of any of the corpses. Also, it makes me mildly worried for what exactly will happen if she kills something person sized.

Hold on. A plant absorbing blood mana? What exactly would my baitplant even do with that? As far as I’ve been able to tell so far, plants convert water and air mana into plant mana as they grow, and creatures like my swarmbug just convert plant mana to blood mana. Can my plants even do anything with blood mana, I don’t want any weird flesh plants, but it also wasn’t my choice to give the plant that mana…

Maybe this is what those two meant about ‘naturally occurring mutants’?