Over the next few days, the child watched adventurer groups come and go throughout their first and second floors. Unlike the first group, the Blue Suns, all of the other adventurer groups seem much weaker. It could also have been them rearranging the aquatic monsters to represent the floors getting more challenging, so they moved all of the ravenous snail monsters to the third floor and spread the ice krill monsters to the second floor.

But it all worked out. From watching them fight, survive, and harvest materials from their dungeon, the people traversing their dungeon aren’t all that good. In fact, ten people have already died, and 20 have been severely hurt by attacking monsters.

Seeing these groups come and go more frequently was not enough to currently overwhelm the floor creature populations. Still, the child was worried anyways, so they upped the breeding populations to keep all of the creature populations steady.

The child turned their attention to building their fourth floor, but they made sure that a small part of the consciousness paid attention to the goings on of the delving teams.

They decided, just like the third floor, to create one room. The child made it mostly c-shaped to fit around their core room and was between ten to 12 m tall and six metres wide, and if they straightened out the room, it would be 25 metres long.

The room, essentially a long curved hallway, was wide enough to add these mini islands. First, they used ice to create the base of the islands around the room, around one to two and a half metres wide and long. Once the base was created, they added soil on top of the ice to allow plants to grow.

With the mini islands made, the child opened up a tunnel off of the one connecting the third floor to their core room.

Water flowed into the room, and the child used this chance to take sand from the area outside their iceberg and fill the bottom of the fourth floor with the sand. As they did this, the water level slowly rose until it was one metre tall. Some of the soil from the islands mixed with the sand and water, making the water slightly murky.

Once the water, sand and soil settled, the child grabbed the mana string from the third floor, which was turning the water more murky and dark, like the water lining the island shores. That was what they wanted for their fourth floor.

With the green-brown mana string in place, the child took a water mana string and started a soft current going around the floor.

They also sent out Ivory and Fisher to bring back more plants and creatures living around the marshy shores of the closest island and the second closest island. They waited until it was dark, and nobody was in their dungeon when they sent out Ivory with the ice bucket. They created a net made out of blade seaweed that is enhanced with their mana not to rip, which they gave to Fisher. The child told Ivory to wait until dark to fly back if she stayed out past dawn collecting creatures and plants.

The child started by adding the red oak and white paper birch to the islands, packing as many trees as possible on a single island. Then, as the trees grew, the child interconnected their branches, making an almost ceiling-like canopy with few open spaces between each island.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

Once the trees were added, they placed cushion moss around the ground and encouraged the moss to grow on the bottom part of the trees. The child placed drooping and mist orchids on the branches and high within the canopy. After the mist orchids were fully grown and producing mist, they gave the room the look they wanted. With mist spreading around the room, the child took the heat mana string from the third floor and brought it to the fourth. They planned to make this type of wet, moist environment, not too warm, just a couple of degrees warmer, but they thought it would help make the environment they wanted.

Along the canopy, they also placed red trumpet vines, and when they placed the monsters on the floor, this would help hide the alluring vines in plain sight.

With the islands completed, the child moved on to growing the water plants. First, they placed brown bush grass all over the floor. They wanted to imitate the environment at the edge of the islands. To do that, they needed to place the brown bush grass, but they didn’t allow it to grow too high, and they didn’t place it in all spots, just enough so that it created a kind of maze flowing from island to island.

They placed tangled fan seaweed along the sand and soil and grasping gel seaweed. Except they made it so that the grasping gel did not grow large like it normally would so that it remained hidden within the grass, waiting for its prey.

Happy with the plants within the floor, the child started moving in land animals first. They brought the yellow finches, the two spider species, the grey water snake, running beetles, white moths, brown singing frogs, and clouded white butterflies. For the aquatic part of the floor, they brought flow krill, the three crab species, blue-ringed snails, whiskered drums, shaded flatfish, spadefish, bank sea bass, swift pinfish, large bank bass, and cloak spadefish.

As all of the animals got used to their new environment and started reproducing, the child felt Fisher return to their territory.

Going out to meet him, they saw that the net that they made for him was packed and, in some cases moving around.

Good job Fisher, praised the child as they took the net bag from him. The child quickly took their mana string and made everything within the bag theirs before they even individually looked at the objects, creatures, and plants.

As Fisher left to go eat one of the spade fishes, the child went through everything in the bag.

They found two plant species. The first was a ripped-up, still-living plant with slender flat leaf blades that are yellow-green. The way the plant grew, the stem looked like a cord, so the child decided to call it the “brown cordgrass.”

The second plant was a flowering plant with yellow flowers and fleshy, gray-green leaves. From the almost-dead look, they knew that the flower was not an aquatic species, so they quickly pulled it from the water and brought it to the fourth floor, where they planted it and made sure it was healthy again. They called this the “yellow sea flower.”

Within the bag, were multiple live species of creatures. The first was something that they had never seen before. It was two worms with what looked to be debris, sand and shells stuck to them. It seemed that the tube was the worm’s home, and the worm was reddish-brown, with antennae and large jaws. They called it the “decorator worm” and brought it to the sandy floor of the third floor, where the child pushed them to start breeding.

The second creature was a squid, light beige in colour. The squid had large eyes with tentacles and a sharp beak. The squid was small, about 50 centimetres long, and was female. The child was lucky, as the female was accompanied by a chain of little fertilized eggs that Fisher managed to get both. They called it the “brevis squid” and placed half of the eggs on the fourth floor and the rest, with the adult female, on the third floor. Once placed, the child used their mana strings to grow them into the adult stage.

The next was a type of predatory sea snail with a knobbed white shell. The snail was 26 centimetres long and, like the squid, had eggs within the shell that they took and grew into adults within the fourth floor. They called it the “knobbed sea snail.”

Along with live species, Fisher collected multiple eggs and egg sacs. The first three egg sacks that were identical to each other were shark species. When they took the sacks to the third floor and hatched them, what came out was a grey shark with black tips on the fins. With their mana strings speeding up the shark’s growth, the child watched as these sharks swam through the water, consuming fish to fill their hunger. They called the sharks “blacktip sharks.”

The last four eggs were white and looked like larger bird eggs. But they were not. When they hatched, they found that the eggs were an alligator species. The alligators, when fully grown, were 1 metre in length and had a rounded snout with black and yellow colouring. The alligators seemed at home on the fourth floor as they slowly, stealthily swam through the water. They called it the “fisher alligator,” giving a nod to Fisher, who presumably risked his life to collect these eggs.

With all of these new additions added into their territory and placed throughout their floors, the child continued on with finishing their fourth floor as more and more adventurers ventured into their first and second floors.