They dragged cuttings of sharp seaweed into their core room and populated most of the room with blade seaweed. But, while the blade seaweed protected the room, they knew it wasn’t enough.

But they did not know what else they could do to protect their core.

Wait… what if I can mutate the plants and animals into something more dangerous? It somehow worked with the blade seaweed, and who knows what else that the ice mana string and water mana string could mutate.

As the child pondered the possibilities and what they could do with their mana strings, a screen popped up before them.

You have created the first floor of your dungeon.

Due to the unique circumstances of your dungeon placement, you have been allotted three choices in how to proceed with the growth of floors in your dungeon:

1. Expanded rooms (rooms can be one size on the outside but a lot larger inside)

2. Sub-dimension (a sub-dimension made of the same materials as your territory but will continue to grow in size with your strength)

3. Dimensional transcendence (the iceberg would stay one size, but the inside could be exceptionally larger)

The child stared at the screen.

… what in the world? Thought the child in great confusion.

If what the screen is telling is true, then they have three options which it will help their dungeon grow due to the “unique circumstances,” which must be because they are creating a dungeon in an iceberg.

While the easiest to understand, the first option was the least appealing. From what they could understand, it means that every time they create a room for a floor, they can make it bigger than its actual dimensions. However, they would still need to continue growing the iceberg to accommodate the rooms, so the child wasn’t interested in this option.

The third option of dimensional transcendence was much more appealing than the expanded rooms. However, it still brought up the same reasoning as the first option. Even though the iceberg can stay the same size, it might only increase the available area to a certain amount. As such, they turned to the second option.

This option is a lot more appealing than both of them, by having an area that will continually grow with their strength and be made up of the same materials as their territory. This was a lot more appealing than the other options.

The child reached out and tapped the second option.

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Hit the confirm button if you want to select the sub-dimension option.

Confirm

The child tapped the confirm button, and everything changed once that button was hit.

A violet, green, and blue swirling portal appeared at the entrance of the core room and sucked themselves, their core, and the room into it.

As the portal swallowed its core, the child blacked out.

———————

Urgh, moaned the child. What happened?

With a pounding pain in their head, the child slowly opened their eyes. They were in their core room, but the room walls were not made of the pressurized ice that they made them. But everything else was the same, from the plants to the wall ledges, and most importantly, their core seemed fine.

They looked further and saw that the ice, the same ice with the microorganisms in it as their iceberg, was only 10 metres wide and 10 metres high, and when they tried to reach further, they hit a block. No matter how hard they tried to push through, nothing worked.

They backed away from the edge and continued to look around. Then, two metres into the ice, they saw the violet, green, and blue portal that sucked them into it.

The child concentrated, and even though they were in their sub-dimension, they could still see and feel the iceberg and their territory.

Quickly, they passed through the portal back to their iceberg and inspected the changes that their choice created.

At the entrance of the previous core room tunnel, the portal was one metre tall and one metre long and swirling colours of violet, green, and blue, the same as their core. The portal was flat and three centimetres thick, and since the tunnel was only 30 centimetres wide and 20 centimetres tall, that was the only part of the portal that something could access. The child intended to keep it that way.

It’s just in case, really, if something big, powerful, or dangerous comes into their territory that they can’t defend themselves, and right now, there is no room at the other side of the portal, just ice for now. And they intended for the second floor to be held within the sub-dimension, but they knew that they were not ready to build the second floor. The first floor was not nearly as close to ready as they had nothing really to defend against anything yet, except for the blade seaweed, which was more passive than anything.

This led them back to what they were pondering before a blue screen appeared before them. As they reviewed what they knew about their mana strings and what they could do, the child felt an intruder pass through into their territory.

The intruder was a fish around 20 centimetres long with a long, spindle-shaped body, a large head and an elongated snout with a large mouth with sharp curved teeth. The fish’s scales were a mix of brown and grey with blue gills and lips, and it went straight for the closest krill swarm.

When they didn’t automatically deal with the intruder right when it crossed their territory, the fish felt like a tiny itch they couldn’t scratch. It wasn’t something that they couldn’t ignore if they wanted to, but it made them constantly aware that there was something in their territory that wasn’t theirs.

They watched for a couple minutes as the fish gorged themselves on the krill before grabbing their mana string and inserting it into the fish.

Just as they inserted the string, the fish jerked as if they had hurt them, and when the golden specks started to flow into them, the fish began to jerk and shake like they were trying to get away from their mana.

After a minute, the fish stopped shaking, and the itching feeling went away. Once the itching feeling disappeared, the child felt the fish become a part of their territory. The child quickly directed the fish into the rooms and scrutinized them.

The child found that the fish was a young female with many eggs inside of her.

Well, at least I don’t have to find another fish of the same species.

They left the fish to explore the rooms and watched as the fish settled on the third room to make its nest in.

They named the fish “icefish” due to the blue gills and lips and how they found blue blood after looking closely at the fish’s anatomy.

Once the icefish was dealt with, the child started gathering crystal krill eggs for experimentation with their mana strings.