Amy waited two days for anything to be attracted to the food bait that she had essentially created surrounding her iceberg, but nothing came.
With a sigh, Amy knew that she was probably going to have to wait a while for anything to come, especially if she was in the middle of the ocean and there was nothing like reef's around to help support life. So, she decided that she'll keep her feelers on the edges of her territory and start working on other things. Things such as the flash-frozen glacial salamander eggs.
When Amy originally pulled up the description to them, it said there was still life within them. So she wanted to try to hatch them. Like everything else that she has done, Amy created one mana thread and inserted it into one of the eggs within the cluster. Like the snail eggs, she slowly inserted her mana, but without pushing her intentions to grow into the egg.
Slowly but surely, Amy injected her mana into the embryo. After a couple of minutes, she could feel a change within the egg. These eggs, before they were flash-frozen, appeared to be able to hatch very soon. So Amy was able to tell that the salamander defrosted and started growing again. With the egg coming back to life, Amy decided to push its growth and increase the amount of mana she injected into it. She then did the same to the other eggs.
One of the feelers at the edge of her territory in the water sent a pulse to her as she was doing this. Something had crossed into her territory, and it wasn't anything big, but multiple somethings crossed over. So before Amy left to go see what this intruder looked like, she removed the mana threads from the salamander eggs and left them to hatch naturally. But she also kept one of the threads to let her know when the eggs hatched.
When Amy went over to investigate the intruders that her feeler alerted her to, and she found shrimp. She only found four, but there were three females and one male, so if she added them to be part of her domain, she should get their population up somewhat quickly. But first, she had to add them to her domain, so she gathered four mana threads and carefully placed them within the shrimp. Amy then started to slowly pump her mana, but as the mana concentration got higher, the shrimp began to shake, but she did not stop. Soon, they stopped shaking, and Amy could feel them as a proper part of her domain, not an outsider or intruder anymore.
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The shrimp were taking up most of her attention. Another feeler in the opposite direction alerted her to something coming into her domain as well. In response to that, Amy ordered the new shrimp to quickly move into the ice roots before she went to look at what set off the feeler.
Unlike the shrimp, what tripped her feeler was not anything dangerous. It was not an animal or monster but a plant. A plant that seemed to have been uprooted and was floating at the top of the surface. Amy was able to quickly make the plant part of her territory by inserting some of her mana into the plant's roots. She then used a mana thread to pull the plant into the ice roots.
Now, she had two new things to work with. But she didn't know what they were or what they did, so she pulled up the descriptions of the shrimp and plant.
Icey Kelp
A light blue and green plant that belongs to the kelp family. This kelp makes its home in cold-water oceans, and where it grows often comes with whole ecosystems that flock to it.
Grey Shrimp
A type of cold water shrimp that is commonly found in the cold oceans. This species of shrimp, when threatened, can create a grey-like secretion that clouds up the surrounding area to help with its escape.
Amy knew that the most valuable of the two would be the icey kelp. The icey kelp can be used in most places that she has underwater, as long as she can adapt it to growing on ice. Though the grey shrimp would not be all that useful out in the open water. She would probably place it in the water tunnels crisscrossing throughout the iceberg and have entrances/exits to the ocean.
Excited to get started on the icey kelp, Amy decided to start with the shrimp first. So the first thing she did was move the shrimp into one of the small bubble water-filled rooms connected to the ocean. The second thing she did was quickening their growth speed. With the shrimp, only one of the females had eggs currently. Hence, she used her mana threads and increased the growth cycles of all of the shrimp's, and when the female released the eggs, she pushed through the quick growth cycles into the eggs.
She then turned her attention to the icey kelp. The problem with the kelp was that plants, at least back on Earth, and she had no clue if they did it on Terra, did not grow on ice. But she had a plan to at least adapt the kelp to root into the ice. First, Amy decided to start with her own mana; then, if that doesn't work, try with the ice mana.
But before she started any of her experiments, Amy needed to have more than one icey kelp. So, she tried increasing the growth, and as it grew larger, more and more sprouts started appearing from the roots. Finally, when three new sprouts appeared, Amy stopped urging the growth. The next part, she knew, was going to be delicate if she didn't want to shred or destroy the new sprout. So she started carefully untangling the roots around each sprout with mana threads, and Amy only severed a few of the roots.
Just as Amy was going to start on her experiments, the glacial salamander eggs began to hatch.