Neither keeping tropical fish nor raising baby bacteria is a speedy, easy process necessarily, lol. If you could be a fly on the wall and watch an experienced aquarist in their house with their tanks you'd probably see them give a little sigh as some new tank process started off as they would know this was a "thing" that would be sitting around being watched and tended for a long time before it would bear fruit.
In many cases the bacteria just come on like gangbusters and so you get tales from people of how easy it is. But in fact that is not always the case and under other people's conditions the little things can be pretty tricky. In your case it may be that a pH level of 8.8 (if indeed that is at all accurate) might be a bit high for the bacteria to like (their optimal growth rate chart seems to peak out more down around 8.0, 8.2, that sort of pH although pH is just one small factor.) Who knows? Perhaps they don't like the plastic or metal of your container, it could be something more weird like that but even more likely it could just be that your water source started with quite low numbers of these two particular bacterial species to begin with and thus you just have a long, long wait for the kinds of bacterial numbers that your test kits will be able to better detect the results of.
If the water gets dosed with the simple household ammonia at somewhere between 1 and 5ppm on a regular basis and the temperature stays at about 84F/29C and ideally the pH is somewhere in say 7.5 to 8.5 we maybe have a greater expectation of seeing the kind of progression in the fishless cycle that we often see reported in the daily logs of our beginners here in the "Your new freshwater tank" section. But it doesn't always go quite that smoothly and sometimes you just have to be patient or perhaps have the members stumble upon some detail of your process that makes a difference.
~~waterdrop~~
