“Nothing is perfect.” - Old folk saying.

“You know, there’s one thing I’ve always been itching to ask, but just never found a proper time to say since I first came here,” mentioned Celia while the group was being shown around by the local guide. It was early spring at the time, and the local farmers were busy with spring planting. The terraced fields were full of activity as far as the eye could see.

A farmer who led an undead construct that plowed the soil could be seen in one field, while another followed behind them with a different construct designed to smoothen down the plowed soil into neat ridges and create holes on regular intervals. The laborious work became far easier due to the help of the undead constructs, and the two farmers easily did the work that would have taken five times their number to perform manually in such a short time.

In other fields where young shoots could already be seen sprouting, skeletons could be seen wandering around as they watered the plants, only to return and refill their watering cans when they emptied it. When they returned to the fields, they continued precisely where they left off. Some of the larger fields even had multiple skeletons on the job, likely to speed things up.

Even so, some people could be seen in other fields as they carefully inspected and trimmed some branches from tea plants. The lack of undead constructs that made work easier and far less laborious was very noticeable amongst the many fields, and they weren’t the only ones either. There were quite a few fields where people still did things by hand.

“Go ahead and ask it, then,” replied Aideen with a nod. When she considered the timing, it was likely that what question Celia had was related to something they could see at the time.

“You have so many sorts of undead constructs, many of which are clearly made to ease the more laborious tasks in farming,” noted Celia as she pointed at the constructs being used in the fields. “Most of the jobs I had done while helping my grandfather out are pretty much all done by the undead here, so why the need for some people to still do things the old way?”

The group noticed that Celia pointed at the fields where people were still doing the farming by hand. Before Aideen could answer, though, someone else beat her to the punch.

“The undead aren’t perfect or all-powerful, Miss Celia,” said Eilonwy. The girl was a budding necromancer herself, so out of the three siblings she was the one most familiar with the use of undead, as was common in the Lichdom. “They work fine for simple tasks, like what you see them used right there, but there are many, many things they are unsuited for.”

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“I’ve seen how your country used them as sentries though? Surely that’s a more complex task than what’s needed for farming?” asked Celia back.

“Again, that's different. For the sentries you see in the villages and cities, their necromancer would assume direct control when there was any trouble that demanded their attention, which naturally allowed for greater fine control,” explained Eilonwy. “Those we set as sentries on the sides of our roads had far simpler instructions. The way they fight and respond to trouble are extremely basic, so they mostly rely on numbers to do anything.”

“Similarly, while many of the more laborious tasks of farming could be automated and given over to undead labor, many other things require expertise and a deft hand. Those aren’t things you could use a skeleton for, at least nobody has managed to give them a satisfactory enough set of instructions for such purposes to this day.”

“What about direct control?”

“At that point that’s pretty much the same as having the necromancer do the labor themselves. They might be able to control a few at once if they’re particularly talented, but since there’s much fewer necromancers around, it’s simply more cost-effective to let the farmers do the thing they’re best at instead,” replied Eilonwy. “No point in giving them nothing to do, no?”

“What about… the ones like those pets your mothers have?” asked Kino with curiosity. Since the siblings were after all Mimia and Èirynn’s children, they naturally often met – and played – with Haon and the rest as well, and since Kino was often with them, she naturally also met the four frequently.

“According to mother, Haon and the rest are rather unique,” replied Rhys with a shake of his head. “At the very least, there had been no other known cases of undead with their own sentience like them. Grandmaster speculated that it had something to do with a unique quality to great-grandma Aoife’s magic, who was the one that created them in the first place.”

“Both of them are trying to research how it was done, and whether they could replicate it or not, but so far, it has not been promising,” added Áine to her younger siblings’ words. “That’s the hard part when magic can often be unique to the person. It’s often difficult for others to replicate what they had done before, even with examples.”

“Anyway, to answer Miss Celia’s question once again, those farmers are working there because the effort needed to get an undead that could identify which of the plants need some trimming, where, and how much, or other things that needed detailed knowledge and experience, is just unrealistic and horribly inefficient compared to just getting a farmer to do it. Unless the necromancer themself is an experienced farmer already, that is.”

“And that’s before you get to the real finicky stuff,” noted Eilonwy. “Copperscale Cloves are notoriously finicky, which is why they only grow on a specific band of height on this place to begin with. They need very specific conditions and care to thrive, something that’d be nearly impossible to do when one relied only on the undead.”

“In the end, the people will have to do the things that truly matter,” said Áine. “The undead is mostly there to free them to focus on those and get the less important stuff done for them.”