Taking the longer water mana string, the child also grabbed one of their smaller but colder ice mana strings.

Grunting, the child began to try to force the ice string into the water string.

At first, they took the tip of the ice string and tried to insert it into the water mana string by the end of the string. No matter how they tried it, the tip would not insert, not like it did when they inserted strings into other non-mana string objects and beings.

The only other method that the child knew might help combine the two strings is knotting.

Taking the two, the child knotted and intertwined both strings together. By the time they finished, no empty areas were left on the strings.

Using their own mana strings and hands, the child slowly began to condense and straighten out the mana string.

Over and over, they rolled and pushed for hours on end.

With each hour that passed, the knotted ice and water mana string got longer and thinner.

After 14 hours, the child managed to flatten and roll out a 50-centimetre-long string. And as they let the string float within the room, the string twitched.

Slowly, the string appeared to be coming alive.

The dull, lifeless look it once had as it was flattened and stretched disappeared as the string began to shift in ever-changing shades of light and medium blues.

With the string returning to life and shifting colours, the mana string also began to produce an environmental effect.

As the mana string sparked to life, the water directly around the string began to get colder. Colder than the waters that they woke up in and a lot colder than the current waters within their dungeon, but not freezing. It didn't seem to have a freezing effect at all.

But the temperature close to the mana string radiated a coldness.

The string continued to circulate just within the eleventh floor, and the water started to become a couple degrees cooler. The child knew that if they let the mana string continue to circulate, the floor would most likely keep on getting colder.

And that's what they wanted. It helped give the floor the appearance and feeling that they wanted for the ice caves.

The child watched the mana string as they pondered what they should call the string.

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Chill mana string? No, that doesn't have a ring to it.

Cold mana string? Well, it would match with the heat mana string, but I don't think so.

Hmmmm, how about frigid? Yes, I quite like that. The frigid mana string.

As the child settled on what to call their new mana string, they split the 50-centimetre-long string into five ten-centimetre-long strings.

They cut the original frigid mana string down because the child didn't want the coldest part of the room to be where the string is currently. So they hoped that by cutting down the string, it would lose some of its potency and keep the coolness of the floor consistent.

With the floor built, the water problem solved, and a new mana string to introduce cold temperatures, the child figured that it was time to add in their plants and animals.

And to do this, they needed to make sure that their species would at least survive in the cold environment.

The child started with coral and algae, with the floor decreasing in temperature.

Coming in varying sizes, they figured that coral would be a good thing to add to their floor. With maybe only a few places that they will be put, it will add some character to the floor. And since they didn't want a floor filled with plants, they thought that it might take away the initial vision of underwater ice caves.

The only coral species that suited the floor is the ice coral. A species that grows about three centimetres wide and five centimetres tall with hard, branch-like protrusions. Cutting off a few pieces of the coral, the child began populating their floor.

Once those original pieces were placed in their new homes and growing in the rooms and pathways, the child noticed some of the corals dying.

When one of the frigid mana strings came close to the ice coral, the corals themselves started to bleach and die off.

It's too cold, realized the child. With the coldest part of the floor was directly around the mana strings, and those direct areas coming into contact with the coral were just freezing and killing off all the polyps that made up the coral structure.

Quickly grabbing one of the circulating frigid mana strings, the child inserted them into all of the pieces of ice coral on the floor that were still alive.

Unlike most times that they have used mana strings, they weren't using them to create a new coral but to help the coral survive in the cooling temperatures.

With the frigid string, the child passively inserted it into the coral and didn't force any of the power into it. They just let the mana string sit within the corals for a time, and as the frigid mana string sat in there, the child also took their own mana strings and pushed just a bit of their golden flakes into the coral to successfully help adapt them.

In just a couple of minutes, the child had a new, slightly different coral growing on the floor.

The powder blue coral stayed the same size and, after a bit of testing, was able to withstand and survive in close proximity to the frigid mana strings. And they ended up calling them the frigid coral.

Splitting the corals on the floor, the child sprinkled the cuttings throughout the rooms and tunnels. Not really close together or in clumps, but enough that it was visible within the rooms.

Once they achieved the look for this floor with the corals, the child added small bits of algae in the rooms and tunnels, but they made the algae stick to the tips of stalagmites and stalactites.

With that done, they started on the animals for the floor.

Looking through all of their creatures, the child started placing some of the schooling and shoaling fishes, as well as other species that they thought would fit into the floor without really any adaptations other than what they did with the frigid coral.

Placing silver anchovies, longnose spookfish, shortnose chimaera, silver spindles, blue wolf herrings, silver signal minnows, blue halfbeak, grey oysters, rock crabs, spindle crabs, weaving crabs, sawtooth eels, red sea stars, and orange mottled sea squirt.

All of these creatures needed to be acclimated to the environment, and some of these creatures went through physical changes, like the frigid coral.

Silver anchovies changed into a semi-transparent schooling fish that they called glassy anchovies.

The shortnose chimaeras shrunk to fifty centimetres long, and their organs and bodies became much more specialized in surviving in a cold environment. It also gained a unique suction cup-like mouth that would allow it to hold onto and burrow into larger animals' skin or invaders' skin. They called them latching chimaeras.

The sawtooth eels gained the same ability as their icefish, where their blood was bluish, and the eels did not need to have as much oxygen to survive. The child called them the blue eels because of their blue blood.

With their base creatures added, the child started picking out animals that they wanted to adapt into either an elemental species or similar to an elemental species.