“All of Noelictus harvests food. We send it across the continent. But it’s cheap. And there’s been taxes.

Not from Lord Lantal, but Ovela. It doesn’t hurt my father’s business, but people have less money…”

“Why not grow something more expensive, then?”

The young woman gave Cara a blank look.

“Like Sage’s Grass? There’s not enough light. Only a few plants grow well in Noelictus. Besides—we don’t know how to grow magical crops well. Then again, father says we might have to figure something out if prices keep falling…”

Violetta had her own frets, the village’s worries as she went to a cottage to pick up her tool for the work.

The [Farmers] were already moving into their fields, and they were hand-harvesting.

Some had ploughs or other ox or horse-driven devices, but Cara saw men and women with scythes to deal with the two fields.

Interestingly, the village worked together on the fields. Each [Farmer] had his own, but he gladly hired out the others. And it wasn’t hard to see why.

“Miss Nuiena has been harvesting since she was a girl. She’s also high-level. See?”

The old woman swung a scythe and mowed down wheat in a radius double that of what it should have been. Cara stared.

Skills. The world encouraged specialization, so there were experts in harvesting just like there were expert planters, ranchers, and so on. Cara let Violetta go into the cottage as she watched the old woman calmly let a younger man with a rake drag the fallen wheat up. He hurled it like an arrow into a pile where someone was already bundling it.

Efficiency. The Humans worked together with skill and Skill and dedication. They were still slower than a combine harvester. But faster than any other point in Earth’s history. Cara looked around the village and felt…out of place.

Some children stared somberly at her from around the covered well in the center of the village. You had to unlatch the covering to get at the water. To prevent something from falling in. But the village had that timeless feel. You could live and die here. And hopefully someone would put you to rest before you rose again.

But she didn’t belong here. Cara was flexing her arms, wondering what she could do that old Miss Nuiena couldn’t in a tenth of the time, when Violetta reappeared. She was ready for her job. Cara turned her head and stared. And she realized in that moment that she had been unkind to Landsmecht.

She had thought that this was all there was to the village. Work. A curse of undeath. And a culture shaped by that. Cara had been wondering if she could bring something to the village. Like…music. An Irish working song. Or something.