15 Chapter 15

Following few weeks after the battle, Richard got on designing his new home. Now that he has a domain in the mainland he wanted to build himself something bigger. The Trant Islands would stay his and his family's sanctuary.

The location for said fortress was in the middle of Rainwood and would consist of the main castle with the city around it. The castle itself is made into a hollowed tree that was 300m tall, growing this structure will take time but upon completion, it will be almost impossible to take down or invade.

The wood of which this tree will be made will be the hardest his CM could come up with that will ensure structural integrity even if the center is hollow with only supporting structures.

Inside of the tree was split into levels, the lower levels were assigned to a government offered services such as education that will be provided. Literate people will be able to find a job as teachers at the next level as administrators. Materials to learn from were obtained from houses that they conquered. Masters of said houses got a choice of teaching in this institute or die, plain and simple.

The Middle section of the said tree was reserved for bureaucrats where all the paperwork will be done and all the integral parts of day-to-day operations of his land will be taken care of. All requests and deals that were done in his land will come through here. Richard planned to use humans for less important work with Dryads at the top that will ensure a lack of corruption and for everything to run smoothly. He just needed time for more of them to grow/be born.

The highest of the floors were reserved for Richard, his family, and guests. The royal section will also serve as a welcome area for guests.

The movement between different levels will be carried out by a massive elevator in the middle of a hollowed-out tree with smaller ones all over for easy access to different levels.

Richard could boost the growth of this Tree and he did but even after that, it will be at least 5 years before it was complete. In meantime, he focused on the city that will grow around it. He certainly didn't want to end up with another King's Landing and be swimming in shit and other filth. Richard designed the city to be built in a circular fashion around the tree, plots for houses, businesses, services, and other institutions were planned and marked on the maps with severs and other necessities like water taken into account to avoid mismanagement and to produce effective and visually pleasing city.

Surprisingly his mother took on herself to see this project done with help of Amara. In her words "I feel younger somehow like I am again in my prime. I already read everything that was available in our library and I want to do something, let me help you." He didn't see a problem with that and with Amara's highly efficient help he didn't have to worry about it.

Richard gave himself a mental note to look into her sudden amount of energy. It is possible that the amount of nature energy rolling around the Trant Islands had some unforeseen consequences on the population.

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Weeks later after all designs were handed over to people to work on he was looking into his mother's claims on her new youth. Talking with the people of Trant Island did uncover something very interesting. All of the older generations experienced the same thing. They gradually became more energetic and healthier. The health side of things could be explained by new diet where they no longer starved and did get everything their body needs but Richard saw a 40-year-old man working on the field like it was nothing which was highly irregular if you take into consideration that life expectancy of smallfolk was 40-50 years if they have a good diet and weren't killed which his people didn't have, they starved until he came around. Richard decided to check on this from time to time as changes all seemed positive and didn't harm his people.

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Another unique event signified the arrival of Marwyn the Mage from the citadel. Upon hearing stories from Stormlands and even if Valyrian glass candles didn't light up he knew magic was back and its source was coming from the south.

(I didn't want Richard's powers to be the same kind as the magic of GoT. Too big can of worms for me to handle. Sorry.)

Marwyn took everything he could carry with him and moved to Rainwood, upon entering the forest he could feel the change in the air, it was somehow fresher, lighter than the rest of Westeros. Walking the main road between the trees he observed the forest that almost glowed with colors.

When he arrived at the building site of an apparently new city he was taken by guards that noticed him to Richard. From there he was given a chance to teach and on the side to research as he liked. Of course, Marwyn accepted, the chance to study living magic was like dream come true for him.

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The next project Richard wanted to take care of were defenses of his new land. He didn't like to rely on his animals for defense. The first and dumbest idea was to just build the wall, which would take far too much time and was inflexible so he quickly discarded it. The next thing was turrets, but they were too little bit immobile for his tastes. In the end, he came back to the thing that was defending his lands from the beginning.

With help of CM, he created a new type of treants. They were large, easily able to throw several tons of stone riped out from the earth, but they also were considerably more slowly moving than regular ones. They were also connected to the map he and Amara created and each other so when force bigger than 2 000 men at once come into the territory of his land they would be noticed and the closest ones would then head the way of invasion. They would not start attacking immediately only to defend themself or if given another order just in case of mass refugees of something, it would not be good to massacre defenseless small-folk running from war or something similar. Upon getting the seeds from CM he pumped them full of energy and started flying all over Rainwood along borders seeding them in.

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