Chapter Seven

In just days of making the announcement of the conditions and requirements of studentship tens of thousands applied of varying ages. Santiago accepted everyone above the age of thirteen and all who were orphaned by the battle which gave him a grand total of nearly fifteen thousand students.

Using the black tree he guided and instructed them showing all of them how to use the power of their minds as the family was once able to. The first of the buildings he decided to erect would be the dorms in each of the five quadrants as well as begin farming the land to provide food for the students.

The dorms would be built using no conventional materials but instead living lumber, in other words they were going to use the wild forests as they were to build. The skills required for reforming trees was taught only in military academies these days, but Santiago’s mastery over the skill was beyond the norm even in his day. The students were able not only to learn a high level skill but learn it from the one who created it, by this fact their ability with molding and transforming trees like clay would slowly reach military standard and would only continue to climb.

Forced growth was also another high level skill, so high level in fact that it was a nonexistent skill. It had become a lost art when the few who could teach it died in the first few centuries as the family conquered the world and when the last recorded manuals were destroyed along with the Familia Codices which had been on the Great Spire ships that were destroyed. This piece of history had been a shock to Santiago, he had written some of the codices and helped with the rest. These codices, tomes written using powerful telepathy and inscribed on the consciousness cores of conquered Great Spires that had been reforged into great books, had contained the greatest skills the family had ever developed, the family laws, the history, and many more great things.

Even the skill to forge using consciousness cores had become a lost art, the cores could be molded to form incredibly powerful and durable weapons such as the Black Tails.

Without the codices it became clear to Santiago as to why the family was not as it should have been, he had learned of their destruction only as he researched and studied to build his academy. While his students worked on building homes for themselves Santiago focused on building a library which would be filled with tomes written on books forged of consciousness cores. He would attempt to reconstruct the codices once more.

He acquired cores by the ton, once he made a request for them his students took the initiative and took to digging them out of the corpses of the fallen spire trees that had not been completely destroyed. They did not shirk in their duties, many felt it was an honor to serve the pilot of the black tree in their free time. The spire trees had been mostly dumped outside the city and were being processed to make use of the massive quantity of free lumber. Those who ran the processing plant did not mind having the students pry apart the corpses for the cores.

The cores were shipped to Noah’s manor where a large room had been set aside for Santiago to use as his room and workshop.

Forging books was easy filling in the pages was not, the skill to make the books into a Codex required strong telepathy because the inscriptions themselves were not words but memories and program packets that would be translated into information in either a visual or auditory form or both. The original Codices went beyond that and could do so much more. The Codex de Lex Legis, or the book of law, had been designed to enforce the law itself, those who broke law would be branded by a glowing seal for all to see describing their transgression. Of course as an infant and with the lack of resources, namely the cores of many Great Spires, he could not forge such powerful codices...yet.

Many of the books he made were placed inside a safe, but a few were inscribed with lessons for the students and those were shipped off to the academy and storied inside the black tree. The black tree would use the tomes to teach lessons as he guided the students in their efforts to build the academy. Using mass telepathy he’d teach classes of hundreds at a time showing them what the books held and helped answer what questions he could using the memories sitting inside the old brain of his master.

Forced Growth and Tree Forging prompted two ventures for the academy that began to provide financial resources for it. The ability to grow crops at a fraction of the time during any season on just about any soil gave the school the means to feed the mass of students. Some took notice of this ability and wanted to buy from the school. A student, a man in his forties, took note of the potential and used his fortunes as well as those of several well of students to buy more land. What they cultivated on those lands was sold for just a little cheaper in the market so as not to crush all of the other farmers.

The second venture was the Architect Guild which was also the most profitable of the ventures. This venture slowed the construction of the academy but it also brought in more money and more students. The roster nearly doubled and the increase in the need for more dormitories started making the academy look like a small city.

The Architect Guild erected a guild hall for themselves in the center quadrant so that more students wishing to be the builders of the future could learn more focused skills. Next to their hall the students who managed the school’s finances built the Management Guild’s hall. Next to them the Farmer’s Guild built their hall and next to them the students who were promoted to Student Teachers built the Teacher’s Guild’s hall. This prompted the dozens of different groups who had anything in common to build a guild hall for themselves from sports to students who enjoyed making art.

Slowly the academy was starting to take shape.

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While Santiago’s popularity breathed life into the embers that would slowly ignite into the great fires that would become his armies it also drew the attention of those who’d rather see him dead.

The communion of Great Spires on the Alocarta world sent out word to the many worlds that were inhabited by their brethren that Blood Chains of the Black Tails was still alive. Now, normally who would care about one measly individual life right? Well...take for example the Alocarta world as compared with other worlds inhabited by the spire trees.

Most worlds are conquered by ten to a hundred Great Spires and once conquered are inhabited by three to thirty Great Spires and the seedlings that mature on that world. Alocarta had been a Great Spire stronghold with three hundred fully mature Great Spires and a vast army of spire trees of varying ages and strengths. When the Alocarta family encountered the world they had numbered at barely a thousand and commanded only three Great Spires. In just a few decades the hundreds of Great Spires on that world were reduced to a sixth of their number, a number that continued to ticker down.

Many Great Spires still recoil at the memories of the monster known as Blood Chains.

The communion of Great Spires far and wide came to a consensus, that if Blood Chains was indeed still alive then he must be destroyed. He must not be allowed to regain military might for fear of what he might do now that his clan was far vaster that it had ever been in his time. After coming to this consensus hundreds of Great Spires far and wide across the nearby stars began transforming themselves. They would take flight soon and in time they would gather on Alocarta with a strength never before seen in the Milky Way.

The movement of the spires prompted an emergency meeting of all leadership representatives of all major worlds.

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“We do not yet know the true purpose of all of these movements,” the center speaker stated. He was standing on a central stage surrounded by the hologram projections of dozens of world leaders. The speaker himself was a hologram as well and was in fact standing in the middle of his office, he was an intelligence officer of the Gurakar and was requested to give his presentation to the rest of the leaders by his leadership.

Of course if there are telepathic trees in space then there must be other kinds of life out there as well no? The Gurakar are from a world that is much like earth and are as varied in races as humans are, but generally they are ten feet tall furry and powerful bipedal felines. They, among a few others have been fighting against the Spire Trees for eons longer than humanity.

“All that we know is that they have started moving at the same time,” the Gurakar continued. “So far the number of Great Spires has reached a monumental number of twelve hundred, such a force has never gathered before. It is likely that their intended target is a homeworld, however we do not know which world it might be. We have remained hidden for a long time and have not had our space invaded yet, if there is any among you who have had your homeworld discovered speak now.”

There was silence.

“Then the situation is indeed dire,” he continued. “They will converge on this world…”

The hologram of him disappeared, replaced by a visual of the Trebol System, a system with more than four hundred Great Spires drifting about its space. A Great Spire stronghold.

“There has been a thirty percent increase in Great Spires in the last few months since the activities began,” he explained. “It is my belief that the spires that have arrived were already in space mobile form and many more will continue and have in fact continued to appear. From here they will head towards their intended target or targets. This...gentlebeings is a massive force that once congregated will have the power to attack multiple homeworlds. Even as we speak my scouts continue to discover more and more Great Spire on worlds far and wide undergoing transformation.”

Bartholomew Fortino Alocarta Numarez, planetary lord and representative of Alocarta and Patriarch of the Fortino bloodline, was present in the meeting. He continued to listen in silence as the leaders started arguing among themselves trying to formulate a plan of action against this potential threat. Unfortunately the Alocarta have little to no influence among the congregation of leaders, so his opinions would matter very little among them.

The meeting continued for days with several breaks in between for needs and sleep. At the end of the third week it was decided that all planetary lords would gather what forces that they have on the Gurakar stronghold system of Ujitar, mind you that it was not their homeworld.

The plan would take years to take effect just as it would take years for the Great Spire fleet to congregate. It had become a race to see who could gather their fleets the fastest, if the alliance of planetary lords failed to gather their fleets and strike Trebol before the Great Spires congregate and leave then the entire alliance space would be in danger. If the struck too early they would also be in danger due to being caught by waves of enemy fleets. They had to arrive precisely moments after the enemy gather, the error margin is also very minute, the latest they could arrive would be just a single day.