With their new environment yet to be explored, the child wanted to combine the five islands’ environment and this new open plateau environment and merge them for their sixth floor.

As the child thought about what they wanted to do, it hit them. Why not do one long and wide room, with the floor making a large bump twice throughout the room? Leaving invaders to traverse two different environments.

These bumps, or rather hills, will be made into their more swampy environment, while the three open spaces will represent their current location in the open plateau.

The child dug out the room that was 41 metres long and wide and 42 metres high, and they pressurized the surrounding ice walls. As they were building the room, they left two 18-metre-high and three-metre-wide hills that spanned the whole width of the room. But they did something special with the ice hills. They created an elaborate series of tunnels and chambers that the fauna of the room could go into that filled the whole ice hills and connected the three water sides of the room. The tunnels were small enough that intruders shouldn’t be able to go through them and allowed them to have the potential to do something with these tunnels in the future.

Once they were satisfied with the room’s layout, the child dug a tunnel from the fifth floor to start filling the room with water.

Water slowly started to fill the room, centimetre by centimetre, following through the tunnels to reach all parts of the room. Once the water level reached just 50 centimetres below the tips of the hills, the child stopped the water flow. Then, with the water level steady, the child created a slow-paced current that winded around the room. They also made a strong, randomly appearing current that pulled away from the hills, catching whatever was in it in their grasp. They called it a pull tide.

Watching the currents operate within the water and making sure that the pull tides were working and appearing as randomly as they wanted them to, the child turned to add flora and fauna to the room.

Unfortunately, they did not have any flora from the plateau, so they only filled in a few spots with blade seaweed and ice blast seaweed, so they focused on making the flora for the hills.

They laced the hills with a combination of ice coral and fan coral. Around and through the tops of the hills, they placed green mangroves, but they made them grow taller and more prominent than they usually did. And when they cut and produced more of these mangroves, allowing them to create a new species of large mangrove that they called “large green mangroves.” The mangroves had a much wider and larger spreading of roots and branches, with leaves growing exponentially bigger, up to 30 centimetres.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Growing these mangroves across the three metres of the hills, the child managed to avoid bringing soil on top of them, something they wanted to avoid.

Once the mangroves were all grown, creating a dense, tall mangrove forest, the child placed plants directly on the remaining ice or onto the trees.

The child placed cushion moss on the ice, which became part of the base environment along with the non-submerged mangrove roots.

The plants that they placed along the ground and roots of the hills were strawberry and dancing bells, mint and bird ferns, bearded and red berry bushes, and black dripping mushrooms. Along the branches, they placed silver vines, string moss, and drooping and mist orchids. But the child made sure only to place these plants sporadically.

They have been thinking it over, and they wanted to continue doing experiments with mana as well as some more experiments with the plants themselves that they have been thinking about for a bit. They knew that they had been focusing mainly on the enhancement of the beings living in their territory with mana strings, but they hadn’t really been focusing on much else.

Hmmmm. Thought the child as they looked over their floor, outside surroundings, and slowly increasing territory. I guess there is no reason why I have to finish a floor as soon as I start working on it.

For the child, imagining, creating, and finishing their floors have always been a race. The situation when they were stuck in the five islands practically demanded them to keep expanding, at least until they created the floor bosses. They really hadn’t had periods where they left the floor unfinished or worked on developing new fauna or flora for the floor while it was in creation.

No humans, signs of humans, or anything that looks to be a potential invader, observed the child as they made one last sweep around their environment, looking for reasons why they couldn’t put 90% of their attention into plant experimentation. The other 10% of their attention was observing their territory and their immediate surroundings and continuing their expansion toward the ocean floor.

That’s it, declared the child. I’m doing it.

Staring at each plant they already put into their room, the child started thinking of what they wanted to do.

That was when they spotted the bird fern and black dripping mushroom. A light bulb occurred to the child when they saw these two plants together.

What if I can combine two plants together?

Quickly, the child took a bird fern and a dancing bell and started working. Surprisingly, as soon as they started working on this, it activated some of their dungeon core instincts that they hadn’t used yet. Taking one of the spores of the fern and the pollen of the flower and using their mana, they managed to mix and combine the two.

As soon as the child was sure that the two had combined enough, they started growing the plant. What came of the cross-breeding of these two plants was a bushy fern that started off with green leaves at the base of the plant but became a bright blue colour at the tip of the fern.

This created a green-blue gradient colour that was very visible on the plant. The plant also swayed in the non-existent wind, giving the fern a slight dancing appearance. The child decided to call this new plant a “blue fern.”

Seeing the result of cross-breeding a bird fern and a dancing bell together, they placed a few of the blue ferns around the floor and jumped into the cross-breeding experiments with their plants.