“Shit! It’s still growing!” I blurted as I switched to mage sight.

It most definitely was. How though? What was causing it to shoot into the air like this? I could see large amounts of growth energy all through the tree, and I followed the stream of power down into the ground. When I saw what was happening, I let out a strangled squeak of a laugh and turned to look out to the edge of my grove.

Sure enough, because I’d designed those windbreak trees to be a certain height, they hadn’t grown past that point. The smaller shrubs hadn’t stopped pumping them full of storm-fuelled growth energy though, and with nowhere to go but to follow the water down, it had all pooled in the aquifer down below the plateau. Right about where the roots of my now enormous happy tree was able to get at it.

The store of growth energy below us was truly staggering to my eyes, and with the tree still sucking it up and growing at a frankly alarming rate, I knew what I had to do. It was time to shape this thing into a house.

“Guys, I need to work, magic stuff. Please don’t disturb me,” I said quickly, sitting down cross legged and closing my eyes. Distractions could very well ruin what I was about to do.

I vaguely heard their alarmed voices around me, but someone shushed everyone else up and I was able to concentrate. I needed to change the internal blueprints of the tree first, so I got to work designing it. I created a ramp, made out of a root that led up to the base of the tree. From there I created an entry hall. The entry hall would have two large rooms coming off it that I intended to be storage. I didn’t think we’d want to cart things too far up the tree.

I then created a central imperial staircase, a stair that ramps up from the middle of the floor until it hits the back wall, where it splits in two to travel up each side. The landing wrapped all the way around the second story of the room. It was then connected to a balcony outside the tree by several open archways. This was where I got a little tricky. All across this balcony I created twisting supports that reached from the outer edge up in a curve to the trunk again.

Spanning between these supports, I formed windows made of the same plantlike crystal that I’d used for some of my first plants, effectively creating an indoor living room balcony area with plant glass. I wondered what it would look like at that scale. Would it have little plant veins running through it?

Opposite the imperial staircase and above the doorway on the second floor, I began a spiral staircase that would be the spine of the structure. I carried it up, creating simple floors with windows as I went. Each window was different to the broad sheets of crystal I’d used earlier though. These were several overlapping leaves of crystal that could be pushed open to allow air to filter in. It wasn’t perfect, but it would have to do for now. Leaving out any internal walls for the floors I had yet to give purpose to, I turned to the next problem.

Bathrooms, and how to make them work. The easy part was the baths, which I created three of. They worked in a similar way to the windbreak trees, collecting magical energies from the nameless garden and transforming them into water to be poured into the tub. From there I mimicked Esra’s bath with the water constantly flowing rather than using an on-and-off tap.

From there I realised I had another opportunity. Separating the baths from the toilets, I created different rooms and ran that bathwater along channels into a group of stalls that would serve as toilets. Enclosing the channels apart from where someone would sit, creating the toilet seats themselves, I moved on to how I would deal with the waste.

Ideally I’d purify it and allow it to join the lake I wanted to create, but I had no idea how to do that right now, so instead I ran that channel all the way down the tree and into the ground, where at least the waste would feed any plants that needed it. I would almost certainly be running into problems later, but for now it would have to do.

Bathrooms and toilets designed, I moved on up the tree some more. I began to straighten out some of the branches at a level that would be quite high up, flattening out their tops and producing broad walkways. The same as I had down at the second story balcony, I wrapped those in plant-crystal and the supports that it needed to stay upright. There, I now had the start of some greenhouses!

Lastly, I needed kitchens, lights and a way to heat the whole place. I just had no idea how to do any of those things right now. Wait… no, I could do the lights. I’d seen the leaves of the outside ring of trees glowing as they collected energy, so maybe if I created some flowers internally that took in energy and… possibly converted it to heat?

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

I just had to be careful with how much heat I allowed them to take in, because too much and it might overheat and damage the tree. I decided to stay safe and have them more as dim ambient lights rather than anything solid right now. Except in the case of the bath water, where I allowed them to collect more. The flowers there were fully submerged in the upstream side and would hopefully keep the water warm. They would however dissipate their heat into the structure of the tree and keep the place warm. Ideally though, the tree itself would regulate temperature using its own instincts and base processes.

With everything I could think of in that moment accounted for, I ran through the whole tree to make sure that the normal base functions could still do their job, rerouting important parts as needed. Nutrients still needed to flow up and down the trunk. In the process of double checking everything, I noticed a problem that the tree was already having.

There’s a certain height limit to each species of tree based on how high they can pump water up from below. My fir tree had run into this problem as it was forced to grow unnaturally large as magic was pumped into it. To help with this, I copied the mechanisms of my windbreak trees again with water, but ran them in the other direction. It seemed to work, at least in my mind simulation, and so with a few final touches like some extra balconies all the way up, I pushed the new instructions into the real fir tree.

I opened my eyes to watch and saw immediate and explosive growth. The staircase up into the entry hall burst out of the side, grinding up the soil as it pushed through like a bulldozer. Rippling up the tree like a wave, my alterations took hold. Windows formed, the second story balcony erupted out in a ring and high above us the greenhouse branches twisted into being.

“Holy shit!” Grace exclaimed, her neck arching upwards.

“Did you just turn your tree into a… a fuckin’ house?” Adam asked incredulously.

“That isn’t even a house!” Kit laughed in excitement. “That’s a full-on tree wizard’s tower!”

“Oh my god, you’re right!” Grace grinned, turning to me excitedly. “When can we go in?”

Seeing their reactions had me grinning like an idiot and my ego prancing around in the grass nearby. After chasing my ego down and forcing it to sit still, I told them, “Let’s give it like an hour or so, I’m hoping it will slow down a little, because otherwise we might all end up as tiny people in a giant’s house.”

“This is the most ridiculous shit,” Troy said with a disbelieving shake of his head. “Like fever dream levels of weird.”

“It’s amazing is what it is!” Grace burbled, taking a few steps towards the bloody great happy little tree.

“I have to warn you all though, I wasn’t able to get any sort of kitchen in yet. I didn’t know how to create enough heat to cook with while keeping the whole place from burning down,” I said in warning, then I grinned at Grace. “There are baths though. I made sure of that!”

Grace gave a wordless cry of happiness and lunged for me, sweeping me up into a hug that had my legs dangling uselessly in the air. Startled, my arms went around her shoulders for support and I held on for dear life as she carried me around in a quick circle before placing me back on the ground.

“I can have a good bath! Civilisation at last!” she yelled up into the sky exuberantly.

I wandered away as Grace celebrated her impending bath, trying my best to recover from her woman-handling of me. I’d only felt it a few times now, but there was a warmth spreading through my lower body that was pleasant in some very unique ways. Arousal was… nice, even if I was feeling it because my friend had just picked me up like I weighed nothing.

Approaching the edge of my plateau, I found much of my previous hard work destroyed. My water collection trees were much like Grace’s hair had been this morning. A mess. A few had been torn out by their roots and flung over the edge into the mists, while some were broken and dead. I even found a branch from my big fir tree that had impacted one section like a meteorite from space, crushing everything in its path before it came to a stop teetering on the edge of the cliff.

My growth energy plants had been whipped to within an inch of their lives, but they were bouncing back. I suspected that the massive excess of growth energy had sustained them and the trees that hadn’t simply snapped in half or whatever. All in all about sixty-five percent of my plants were still alive, which was bad, but also better than I’d feared.

Deciding to be useful, I picked up a few of the dead branches with my telekinesis and began dragging them back to the others. We may as well cook our food over an open fire in the middle the grass fields until I figured out our kitchen problem.

“Hey, I have firewood,” I called as I got back to them, dumping the broken remnants of my trees nearby.

“Oh, ouch,” Adam said with a sympathetic laugh. “Guess the storm wasn’t just the tree version of viagra.”

“Nope,” I sighed. “A bunch of my work was wiped out, but I mean… I got that thing out of it, so I can’t really complain,” I said, gesturing to my enormous wizard’s tree. It was slowing down now, the energy required to make my changes using up a lot of the growth energy that had been stored in the water below.

“I’ll start a fire then,” Troy said, bending down to pick up a twisted and broken piece of tree. Then he looked up at me with a smile. “This is amazing Ryn, crazy, wild and amazing. Good fucking work.”

“Thanks,” I grinned, turning up to look high into my tree’s branches. I really had done good work. Wait, oh no, my ego! It was hopping away again!