The first thing the child did was to take the plant with sharp edges and propagate them. The sharp edges of the plant could be a potential defence against any outsiders, so they wanted around half of the plants of the rooms and pathways to be this adapted plant. As the child was splitting and growing the plants, they realized they had not named them yet. After looking at the key characteristic of the changed plant, which is being sharp, they have decided to call it sharp seaweed.

They placed the sharp seaweed in some of the larger tunnels and in the other three rooms. Once everything was fully grown and growing in the pressurized ice pebbles, the child started growing the blade seaweeds. Soon the majority of the tunnels and rooms were filled with green.

With the plants settled, the child turned their attention to the animal populations. Unlike when they first acquired the animals and increased their growth until they grew into adults, the child wanted to speed up their reproductive cycles to fully populate the rooms. So they chose the krill population first and started inserting mana strings into half of the current adult population. Once they were inserted, the child pushed a good amount of golden flecks into them. After a bit, they stopped the flow, took out the mana strings and kept a close eye on the krill population.

Unlike before, when the child saw an immediate reaction to the growth of the eggs into the hatching and growing of the krill, there was no immediate reaction. Instead, after about a couple of minutes, the child noticed that krill were paring up and that females were starting to release hundreds of eggs. Those eggs then began to rapidly grow in size and began to hatch.

The krill that were born went through their adolescent stage very quickly, but their growth slowed as soon as they reached their adult stage.

The child was happy that this experiment worked, but they wanted more krill, so they repeated this process twice. Very quickly, swarms and clusters of krill that’s population were bursting at the seams within the rooms and hallways. The krill population was too much for the rooms and hallways, so some of the clusters went through the passage and into the outside waters that were part of their territory.

They continued to watch how the outside water krill navigated around and underneath the iceberg, adapting well to living within the open waters. This pleased the child, as they knew that there must be bigger things out there living in the water. The krill were small and plentiful enough to be a potential prey source for larger animals. And since the krill stayed within their territory, any potential predators would have to cross through, allowing them to gain another creature to their domain.

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Just like with the krills, the child used mana strings to speed up the reproduction of the blue-ringed snails. Over and over again, they did this until the snail population was bursting within the rooms. There were not as many snails as there were krill, but there were enough that the child decided to see if the snails could live outside the rooms on the outside of the iceberg.

Once outside, the snails tended to congregate at any indents and crevices, the nooks and crannies of the iceberg. With the snails done, only the oysters were left to repopulate. After putting in the mana strings, they watched as the male oysters released sperm and the female’s released eggs fertilized with the sperm. Once the eggs were fertilized, they grew and became this tiny larva that grew and began to grow soft shells. The small oysters started to travel across the ice tunnels and pebbles before hunkering down and developing a harder shell. After repeating the process two more times, the child watched as the oysters almost completely covered the floors of all the rooms and half of the tunnels that were large enough to host them.

The child stared at the little ecosystem that they had created. How all the creatures lived in balance, with the krill eating some of the small organisms living in the water, the oysters doing the same, and the snails eating some of the organisms living within the water and the dead plants.

With the addition of the rooms, plants, and creatures, the child felt… stronger. They were not physically stronger, but like they had more mana strings than before. They haven’t paid attention to the actual circulation of their mana for a bit, so they turned their attention to the circulating mana. The mana strings were denser than before, and the child knew what to do.

The increase in the density of mana strings gave them hope that they could expand their territory. So they grabbed a big chunk of the circulating mana and pushed it as far away as possible.

The child pushed and pushed the mana strings out of their territory’s boundaries as far as it would allow them.

Each push extended the circulation paths, but they soon reached an impasse, an unbreakable wall they could not push past. Once they hit that wall, they let the mana strings go and watched as they started circulating in the new parts of their territory.

Their expansion allowed them to gain an additional six metres in all directions. As a result, the new size of the territory is 29 metres wide and 24 metres tall.

With the expansion, the child’s territory reached a bit into the edge of the closest iceberg. And who knows what that iceberg could lead to.

But the iceberg wasn’t in their territory, only a couple of centimetres of ice they could access. So, the child knew they had to somehow drag the iceberg into their waters.

The child created a thick braided rope with their mana strings and attached it to the ice they could reach. Once it was securely attached, the child started to pull the rope back. Then, centimetre by centimetre, the iceberg slowly began to enter into their territory. Their mana circulation quickly made work of the unclaimed ice as it entered.

It took hours to pull the iceberg entirely into their territory. But once it was in their territory, the child released the braided rope and let the mana strings go back into circulation. They watched as the smaller iceberg bobbed around their waters, but it never crossed back to the outside world.