Calder was right when he said that if we continued floating along the current going South, we would reach the Amware trench reef.
After about a week of floating by the current, Amy was just able to see the trench reef, well, more like feel it. The mana that saturated that place was very strong and quite different from what she had experienced. Well, she assumed that it was the Amware trench reef.
But anyway, from what Amy could tell, the reef was quite big and stretched a long way out. It seemed that the current flowed beside it, so she decided that she would get further down the reef before she anchored.
Once she was far enough down, where she could only just see the end of the reef, Amy anchored down. She opened up the two rooms containing the two anchors and slowly lowered them down. She quickly realized that she was three kilometres short on chain length. So as she lowered the chains, she quickly created and added chain links to the chains. Once the anchors reached the ground, the current dragged her before the anchors finally fully anchored to the ocean floor.
After she anchored onto the ground, Amy let Calder know they had arrived. When she quickly scanned her territory and sub-dimension, she found him in a smallish cave of ice within one of the icey kelp forests. He had apparently made it into his home with weaved kelp and small tools already built and placed within the cave.
Hey Calder, we reached the Amware Trench Reef.
After she informed the siren, Amy went about preparing the iceberg and her creatures for what may happen. Since she was only about 80 metres away from the edge of the reef, she needed to be able to defend the iceberg if anything came from the reef that she was unprepared for.
Since she was anchored 80 metres away from the reef, and her territory spans 70 metres away from the portal entrance. That left 10 metres between the very edge of the reef and her territory, which Amy knew she would try to rectify.
Like all the times she has done this before, Amy set about increasing her territory size so that I could safely go through the reef to see what's out there.
She pulled a thick piece of mana thread away from the circulation and pushed it further and further away from her territory. Amy continued this until she couldn't push it any further. When she was at her limit, she continued doing this on all sides of her territory. When she was done, she added 23 metres to her territory on all sides, making her territory once again perfectly circular in width.
After seeing the additional 23 metres of growth that she achieved with growing her territory, Amy decided to do the same above the surface and below the ocean's surface. After some sweating and pushing her mana as far as she could, Amy achieved growth an additional 7 metres above the surface and 12 metres below the surface.
Her territory now spanned 33 metres above sea level, 45 metres below sea level, and 93 metres wide, spanning within a circular cylinder fashion.
Since Amy had no clue what was in the reef, she decided to set up a bait area to see if she could lure some of the animals that lived in the reef out.
So, she created this lure the same way she did about creating mini-habitats around the iceberg. Amy decided to create a floating ice cylinder.
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She grew a piece of ice off of the side of the iceberg before she stopped the growth and pulled the piece of ice off of the iceberg. The piece of ice that she pulled off was about five metres in length and ten metres in height, and once it hit the water, Amy quickly created a small but strong chain that stretched 80 metres and connected it to the iceberg. She made these chains especially strong so that they would not break without her willing them to break.
Before she let the piece of ice float out far enough, Amy started growing the ice roots, and once they were large enough, she placed a few strands of icey kelp onto the ice. After the icey kelp, she directs some of the prey fish and a few predators, like grey shrimp, silver anchovy, redfish, and ice barracuda, to the ice roots. Hopefully, it would lure something that she could add into her territory and dungeon out of the reef.
Once everything was situated, she let the ice roots float out towards the reef. The ice drifted with the current, but it stayed close to the reef, and Amy was pleased with the result.
In Amy's mind, all that was left now was to wait to see what came out of the reef and explore the very beginning of the reef and the surrounding area.
Before she began exploring, Amy decided that a few things were underutilized or not added but in her possession that she needed to add to her dungeon and territory that she had left on the backburner for too long.
One of these underutilized creatures was the boar shark egg sack that she never hatched. The egg sack contained two to four pups that, depending on gender, could speed up growth and have them mate, producing more pups.
So, she placed the boar shark egg sack into her sub-dimension, inserted a mana string into the sack and pushed her mana into it. Quickly the pups within the sack started to break through it, exposing that there were three pups within the sack.
When they came fully out of the sack, she inserted a mana string into each of the three pups and pushed mana and the underlying suggestion of growth with the mana. After about five minutes, Amy watched as the boar shark pups became fully grown. Out of the three of the sharks, two were female, so, with the mana string still inserted, she stopped the growth order and replaced it with reproduce.
With that taken care of, Amy decided to take a look at the salamanders that she hadn't paid attention to in a while. She had previously left the sodden salamander as her core defender, the deep freeze salamander was left within her iceberg, and the three glacial salamanders were placed on the ice within her sub-dimension and were given the push through her mana to reproduce. During the time that she had last paid attention to them and now, they had bred successfully four times, producing 27 offspring in different stages of growth.
All of those offspring except for two were glacial salamanders, but the two that were different seemed to be a new evolution for the salamanders. When Amy pulled up the description of the two different salamanders, she saw that they had the same evolution.
Hydrius Salamander
A species of salamander that has adapted to live purely within a water environment. This type of salamander has long whiskers, which it can use as radar for prey and predators up to a certain distance. It also has slight control over water mana and can shape water with it.
Hmmm, murmured Amy, well, this can be useful.
The hydrius salamander could help her with exploring the reef. It was a surprise to see the new adaptation, but that was not why she turned her attention to the salamanders.
Amy wanted to see if she could breed more of the sodden and deep freeze salamanders as there were only one each. So, she pulled one of the male glacial salamanders, placed it in the cave where the female deep freeze salamander lived, and pushed the idea of reproduce into them. Then she turned to the sodden salamander and picked up and placed the salamander in one of the ice caves that was partly underwater with a female glacial salamander and once again pushed the idea of reproduce into them with mana threads.
After dealing with her original intentions, Amy turned her attention back to the hydrius salamanders, who just so happen to be male and female. And if she could get them to produce the same adaptation in their offspring, then she would have the perfect explorers for the Amware trench reef.