"Goldfish, two males and three females... Light Fiends, three males and one female, eggs already laid..."
Inside the Pet Shop, Mu You held a pen and paper, recording the conditions in the ecological aquariums before him by category while feeding the fish food mixed with crushed leaves from the Tree of Life.
Fish laid eggs very quickly, especially these magical fish. In the Otherworld, natural predators severely limited their survival rate, but they faced no such problem in an aquarium.
Mu You's family had always been in the business of selling flowers, birds, fish, and insects, so raising them was within his field of expertise. He had bred them with little trouble. Of the large tanks of ornamental fish before him, three already contained eggs, and the fish in the others had all been paired up.
For now, Mu You had decided to focus on breeding six varieties of ornamental fish to sell as pets: Goldfish, Rainbow Fish, Light Fiends, Ice Angels, Color-Changing Fish, and Parrot Fish.
Goldfish, Rainbow Fish, and Color-Changing Fish were all magical fish whose good looks came from the changing colors of their scales. They had no other uses; they were purely decorative. Although Goldfish scales could produce pure gold, the layer was so thin that it would not even cover the extraction costs. Besides, who among those who could afford magical fish would care about that little bit of gold?
The remaining three-Light Fiends, Ice Angels, and Parrot Fish-did have special abilities. Light Fiends could glow, Ice Angels could create ice and move through it, and Parrot Fish could mimic human speech like parrots. Of course, they could not understand what they were saying. If their intelligence were awakened through special magic, perhaps they could hold simple conversations.
The rarest and most valuable of these