Amy knew that ice was … easy to destroy, melt, break. However you name it, it was very easy to break it, and she didn’t know what the effect of her natural dungeon mana will influence the ice with durability. So, her goal was to make the walls of the air-pocket rooms into something close to unbreakable by outsiders.

Amy chose the room close to the outside of the iceberg that was completely empty, except for a few stones. To test the strength and durability of the walls, she took one of the stones and threw it at the wall as hard as she could. Then, with a big whack, the stone was embedded five centimetres within the wall. Amy was surprised about her newfound strength, but she knew that this would allow her to test her ideas more easily.

With the demonstration of how strong the ice is without any help, Amy got to work.

The first thing that she tried was similar to how she added the iceberg into her territory. But, unlike when she was adding to her territory, Amy decided not to use a single thread of mana, but many. Her plan was to use those mana strings by weaving them together to strengthen the ice.

Amy decided to create five horizontal and five vertical threads of mana. But unlike when she claimed new territory, the vertical threads would still be connected to the circulating mana. In contrast, the horizontal threads would be connected after she weaved them.

She quickly weaved the five horizontal threads through the vertical threads. She connected them back into the circulating mana before settling it a couple of millimetres away from the room. Amy took the same stone that she threw first hand and threw it. Unlike the comparison throw with the stone where it embedded five centimetres in, this did not go as far in. The stone is embedded three centimetres in the ice.

While not that good of a result, Amy was very pleased. This proved that this weaving technique worked at making the ice tougher and less likely to be damaged, well, as far as she knew. Who knows what would happen when something actually tries to invade or fight within her dungeon, when she actually started to create the dungeon part.

But, it was not enough. The mana weave only stopped it from going in two more centimetres, so she figured that more mana strings needed to be added into the weave.

So, Amy added two more horizontal and vertical threads into the weave. This, once again, prevented damage, but the stone, when thrown, managed to get one centimetre into the ice.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

So she did this experiment again and again until there was no more damage to the ice when she threw the stone.

Then, after adding 10 more mana threads to both the vertical and horizontal sections, did Amy finally get it to the point that there was no damage to the ice when she threw the rock. Thus, the final version of the mana weave utilized 18 threads horizontally and 18 threads vertically.

With a smile, Amy released the mana threads and merged them back into the mana stream. She did this because she hadn’t created her dungeon yet, and Amy wasn’t ready to start it yet.

After figuring out how to make the ice more protected than normal ice, Amy moved onto the next thing that she really wanted to figure out. How to create and modify the ice.

Amy knew that back on Earth, ice is created when a liquid cools down, and the potential energy is reduced, and the molecules start to move slower and start to stick together, forming ice. So, she started looking through her rooms until she found the right one that would be perfect for this experiment.

The room that she chose had half of the room filled with water. But Amy didn’t know where to start.

For over an hour, Amy stared at the water, trying to figure out how to tackle this experiment. But before she figured out how to start this, she saw something move at the very edge of the room. Something so small that she wouldn’t have noticed it if she wasn’t a dungeon core. At the edge of the room, a tiny piece of ice started growing out into the room like a branch on a tree. This was very interesting, but something more interesting was inside the little ice branch.

A light blue thread of mana, not Amy’s, but as she studied it closely, it had a more cool feel to it. The light blue mana filled the small ice branch, allowing it to grow 0.001 millimetres.

Amy stared at the light blue mana and then realized what she was seeing. Unlike her own mana, where it originated from her, this blue mana seemed to be born from the ice. Then it hit Amy. If there was ice mana in this room, then it should be all over the iceberg. She just hadn’t noticed it.

Amy carefully looked at the iceberg. Unlike before, she was trying to find something that has hid from her until now. Amy found the blue mana that she decided to call ice mana in a couple of places on her iceberg. The ice mana seemed to be spawning ice at a slow rate, but ice was spawning. So if she could figure out how to utilize or generate the ice mana herself, she should create ice.

At first, Amy tried dominating a strand of the ice mana with her own mana, but it just moved away from her mana. That obviously didn’t work, so instead of using her own mana, she tried using the ice mana like she would her own, but nothing happened.

So instead of dominating or trying to use the ice mana as her own, Amy decided to go for a more subtle option. She decided that she would try to feed her mana to the ice mana in hopes that she would either be able to control the ice mana then or be able to produce her own ice mana.

Amy created a thread of her own mana and released her hold on it very close to the ice mana. She watched very closely as the ice mana strand started to drift closer to her uncontrolled mana. Then, it began to absorb her own mana and started to grow. Amy kept on feeding ice mana with her own dungeon mana. As the ice mana grew from her own mana, she could feel the ice mana more and more, just like her own mana.

With a smile, Amy tried once again to get the ice mana to do what she wanted. So, she tried pulling it towards the closest room, and it followed what she wanted.