The child observed the room, and while the animals and the plant quelled an instinctual feeling within them, it did not mean they were happy with leaving the room as it is. On the contrary, the room looked empty and not at all finished, so as the child observed the room, they realized what was bugging them about it.

There was an abundance of snails, krill, and oysters around the room in general, but there was only one plant, and they resolved to fix it.

The first thing that they did was to make sure that the plant would actually survive staying in the room. Initially, they hastily wrapped the roots of the seaweed around pressurized ice pebbles. Still, the child wanted to make the plant thrive. So they took one of their mana strings and started, for that lack of a better term, sewing the roots around each ice pebble. This way, the plant could survive being in contact with the ice for an extended period of time. After a bit of time watching the roots’ reaction to being sewn around the pebbles, the child noticed that they seemed to be doing well and were not having any harmful side effects that they could sense.

With the anchoring of the plants being fixed, they focused on replicating the seaweed so that the room would not be as bare anymore.

They wrapped a mana string around their hand and carefully severed a leaf blade and a small piece of root. Once the plant parts were severed and away from the blade seaweed, the child took their mana string, threaded it throughout the leaf and the root, and connected it back to the threads in circulation.

Once the thread was in place, the child started pushing more and more gold flecks into the plant cuttings. Then, just like what they expected, the leaf and the root started growing. Soon enough, the leaf and the root grew into blade seaweeds, and the child replicated this process repeatedly until the plants fill the room. This process reproduced the seaweed perfectly except in one case. There was one blade seaweed that, while appearing very similar to its brethren, contained a golden fleck or two even after the mana thread was removed.

While looking very similar to the other blade seaweeds, the edges of the leaves of this particular seaweed were a lot sharper and more durable than what they have observed with the other blade seaweeds.

This was very interesting to the child, as it represented a change that they somehow facilitated with their own mana. Out of every cutting of the plant that they grew into an adult version of its species, this mutation with their gold flecks only occurred once.

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The change represented an opportunity for the child to gain even more plants and animals to their domain. But with everything else, the child was happy with the process, and they knew that they would continue to expand.

With the expansion of the rooms in mind, the child started to look at what they wanted to do and where to place them.

The core studied the available space so that they can add rooms and came up with the idea for an additional three rooms. These rooms would be spread apart with interlinking tunnels and pathways connecting the four.

Slowly, the child started to carve out the rooms one by one, leaving pressurized ice-enforced rooms along with pressurized ice pebbles on the floor. Each of these rooms were carved out in four directions, East, West, North, and South. They may not actually be placed in these directions as the iceberg shifts directions as it flows with the ocean.

The one thing that all of these rooms did have in common was that the majority of the height of the rooms are below sea level. The second room was two metres high and one metre wide, and the third was two metres high and two metres wide. The fourth was the tallest at three metres and one metre wide.

Once the rooms were carved out, the child started creating the tunnels and pathways. The smallest of the paths was five centimetres by five centimetres, and the largest was 50 centimetres by fifty centimetres.

The child took the leftover ice from the tunnels and condensed it into pressurized ice pebbles, that were placed in some of the more extensive tunnels.

Whether the tunnels and pathways were connected through ceilings, the walls, or through the floors, they all connected to each other, except the child did not yet connect the first room to any of the tunnels. If they connected the tunnels and pathways to the first room, the water level would drastically drop and potentially kill or damage any plants or animals inhabiting the first room.

The child unsealed the tunnel connecting the outside waters to the first room, but they didn’t pull the whole ice from the tunnel. This time the child reduced the width of the tunnel from 50 centimetres wide to 25 centimetres wide. And unlike the first time, they created the outside tunnel and pulled it into the first room; this time, they pulled the ice from the tunnel into the outer waters. Then, they started to merge it to the side of the iceberg with their mana strings, both their own strings and the ice mana strings.

The child knew that instead of keeping this world closed up, they may be able to attract some other plants or animals into their domain. Once the tunnel to the outside was open, the child opened all the tunnels and pathways connecting the first room to the three other rooms.

With the sound of water rushing against the ice, the rooms started to fill up rapidly with the water from the outside, along with the displaced snails and krill that were swept up with the rushing water.

Very quickly, the water filled up most of the rooms, though the second, third and fourth rooms did not completely fill up with water. The second room had ten centimetres of air, the third had 25 centimetres of air, and the third had 50 centimetres of air.

The child watched as the animals and plants recovered from the quick influx of water after the fast water flow ceased. Though water still did flow in and out of the rooms and from the outside waters.

Once everything calmed down, the child again started working on increasing animal populations, replanting, cutting, and growing the seaweed into some of the tunnels and the rooms.