Novels2Search

Chapter Nine

The iceberg was smaller than the one that held its core. It was only seven metres tall and five metres long, but the ice may have objects or beings within it, so the child started to carefully search through it.

Halfway through their search, they found a tiny broken cylindrical clay pot around 15 centimetres long and ten centimetres wide with a clay stopper at the mouth of the intact portion of the container. It was like the pot was dropped and partly shattered on the ice before being covered with ice. While the pot was interesting, what the pot held was much more important to the child.

Within the debris of the clay container was dirt and seeds. As the child inspected the dirt and seeds, they felt that the tiny organism that lived in their ice and the water were still alive in the frozen soil. While the soil was frozen, it was like the microscopic organisms were frozen solid but still “alive.”

The twenty seeds they found within the soil and clay shards were non-viable, but within those twenty seeds, the child could sense a few that still had sparks of life in them.

The child knew instantly what they wanted to do with the seeds, but first, they had to prepare the environment for the plants.

First, they dragged the smaller iceberg towards the main iceberg, and with the two ice mana strings, they attached the smaller iceberg to the main one. The rectangular piece of iceberg ended up with a small seven-metre-tall and five-metre-wide piece of ice jutting out on the opposite side of where the tunnel to the rooms are.

With the small iceberg attached, the child started on digging out a room around the broken pottery, soil and seeds. Unlike the set of rooms they built earlier, this room would not be filled with water at all. In fact, this room is going to be specifically for growing those seeds.

The chamber that they carved was large. They were able to create a few layers of pressurized ice that were thin enough to let in the light from the outside but was strong enough to protect it from anything outside. The room was about six metres tall and four and a half metres long.

Once the chamber was dug out and reinforced with the pressurized ice, the child started to carefully dig out the pot from the ice. First, they carefully separated the broken clay pieces from the frozen pile of soil and seeds. Once the clay pieces were removed, the child stared at the frozen pile in curiosity.

Hmm…, thought the child, I wonder if I can pull the ice from the soil.

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With this idea in their head, the child grabbed one of the ice mana strings and wrapped it around and inside the frozen soil. Once the child weaved the ice mana around and through the soil enough, the child pulled every piece of frozen water from the soil.

The end result of this was unexpected. Unlike what they initially thought the ice mana strings would do, the pulling of ice particles did not take the ice out of the soil. Still, it changed the state of the ice into water.

The child was left with a small pile of runny soil and seeds on the ground. They quickly grabbed all the seeds, set them to the side of the room on a little flat groove, and turned their attention to the soil itself.

With the ice melting and the soil becoming soft and viable again, the child noticed that all the tiny organisms seemed to have gone into hibernation when frozen. They also noticed that the water was different from what they were surrounded by. The child knew that these microbes in the soil were good and were going to be very helpful, along with the water, with what they wanted to do with the soil. However, since there is very little soil, the child knew that the amount of soil would barely be able to support the growth of a plant.

With a bit of instinctual knowledge, the child created a tunnel through the iceberg to the top of the fourth room, where they could drag materials through to grow the amount of dirt. They looked through each room for any damaged, not-healthy, or dead plants. Any time they found any plants that met their criteria or had dead stems or leaves, they cut the part off or dragged it through the hole and into the room and placed them on top of the soil.

Soon enough, the child had cut or dragged all of these plants from all of the rooms and hallways, and then they got to work. Just like they did by drawing out the ice from the soil with the ice mana string, they created a net around and inside with their mana strings. Then, they started pumping their golden flecks through to the soil. As the flecks were being pushed, the child began to churn the soil and plants.

They churned and churned and churned the soil, and as they did that, they watched how the seaweed was dissolved into the soil through the use of the tiny soil organisms. Slowly, the pile of soil started to get bigger, but the amount of seaweed they pulled from the rooms only tripled the amount of dirt they had.

The child did not want to wait for enough seaweed to die or get damaged enough to pull from the rooms to the chamber, so the child started to cut and grow the seaweed just for it to turn into food for the soil organisms in order to get more soil. It took many hours of cutting and growing the seaweed and churning the soil consistently in order for the soil to cover two-thirds of the floor with a couple of centimetres of soil coverage.

They stopped at two-thirds of the room as if they had any idea. Then, a thought occurred to them when they pulled the ice from the soil and left the water.

What if I pull the ice from a chunk of ice? Would it leave behind fresh water?

In the middle of the room, the child dug out a divet that at the deepest point was 50 centimetres deep. And with the pulled ice, they wrapped and inserted their ice mana string, placed the ice back into the divet and pulled the net of mana strings out of the ice.

As they pulled, the areas where the ice mana was pulled liquified into the water that they saw when they did this to the frozen soil.

Quickly the water filled up the divet and overflowed a bit into the surrounding soil. After the water calmed down, the child moved the soil so that it covered the majority of the floor with different thicknesses in soil height. The child took a step back and glanced over the chamber before they turned their attention to the twenty seeds.