Necromancer: Kingdom Building with My Legion of Undead Knights

Darion looked over the farmland and found himself thinking about his undead.

It made sense to think about it. He had knights sitting in his inventory, just waiting around between uses.

They were tied to him, never got tired, didn’t need food or rest or pay, and they could follow instructions.

The farmland needed workers. Workers were something he had plenty of, theoretically, as long as he had enough graves to dig up.

At first, the logic seemed simple. But the more he thought about it, the more complicated it got.

The undead worked because of preserved combat instinct. That was the core of what made them functional. It was not intelligence, not adaptability, but the deep physical memory of what they had spent their lives doing.

A knight who trained for twenty years had that training in his bones, literally. When he got revived, that training came back. Not perfect, but good enough. That’s why they could follow orders, hold positions, and react to threats. The body remembered fighting, even if the mind was gone.

Farming was a whole different kind of muscle memory.

Plowing a field required a feel for soil resistance, for when to push and when to ease, for the angle of the blade...

Planting required using your best judgement: how deep to go, how far apart to space things. It’s not something you can just do by rote. You learn it by feel, season after season, by planting and seeing what works.

Tending crops required the ability to read what was growing, to recognize what was wrong and respond to it.

None of that was in a knight’s hands. A knight’s hands knew how to grip a sword, how to hold a shield and how to manage a horse in battle.

If he sent one of his undead knights into this field with a plow, the most likely outcome was that it would stand there with the plow in its hands and do nothing useful, because the muscle memory it was drawing on had no frame of reference for what it was being asked to do.

Or worse, it would interpret the implement as a weapon and do something unhelpful with it.

He almost smiled at the image.

Though ( and this was a thought worth following) the system had surprised him before.

He hadn’t known he could revive animals until the wolf. He hadn’t known about venomous undead until the snake-bitten knights.

The system had categories he hadn’t discovered yet, mechanics that revealed themselves when the conditions were right.

There was nothing in what he currently understood that said dead farmers couldn’t be revived the same way dead knights were.

A farmer who had spent forty years working this specific type of soil, who had that knowledge preserved in whatever fragmented form combat instinct was preserved in knights, that would be a genuinely useful thing.

Undead farmers.

Tireless things, requiring no wages, no food and working from sunup to sundown without complaint.

The idea had a certain appeal that he didn’t try too hard to suppress.

He didn’t know if Percvale had farmer graves. He didn’t know if the system would classify it the same way, or whether farm labor was specific enough to constitute a preserved instinct or just general physical memory that didn’t translate.

Was it possible by the rules of his system? Could it be done?

He didn’t know enough yet.

But he dismissed it as something to ask the system about later, because if it was possible it changed the calculation on the farmland considerably.

He dismounted and tied the horse to a section of the low stone wall that looked like it would hold, and walked into the fields.

The soil was worse up close than it had looked from the saddle. He crouched and picked up a handful, turning it in his fingers.

It was dry and pale, almost sandy in texture, the kind of soil that had been stripped of whatever made it useful, either by the burning, or by years of nothing growing in it and the organic matter breaking down without being replaced, or both.

It crumbled without holding together. Good soil had weight to it, a density, a faint touch of something ok.

This had none of that.

It wasn’t dead beyond saving. He didn’t think so. It had been farmland once and the signs of that were still there — the levelness, the old furrow lines, the stone walls that marked its edges.

It needed work and it needed time but it wasn’t ruined.

He stood up, brushed the soil off his hands, and walked toward the farm building that was still standing.

Garren waited outside while Darion ducked through the doorway.

The interior was dim, the missing section of roof letting in a column of grey light that illuminated the dust moving in the air.

Old tools were stacked against one wall, long-handled implements, most of them rusted to varying degrees, the wooden handles warped from years (most likely decades) of moisture getting in through the damaged roof.

A bench along the far wall had partially collapsed, one end dropping to the floor. Shelving on the right side, the boards bowed and some of them split.

He moved through the space slowly, checking the structural state of the walls, testing the floor with his weight in different spots.

Then he felt something.

Death Perception didn’t announce itself loudly, it was more like a change in the quality of his awareness, a direction his attention was pulled toward without deciding to go.

He had felt it in the graveyard and recognized it now.

He could feel something dead, nearby, and not long-buried or scattered. Something with structural integrity remaining.

He followed it.

It led him to the shelving unit on the right. He moved closer and looked at the shadow behind the bowed boards and then pulled the unit slightly away from the wall.

Behind it was a door. Old and stuck in its frame from years of disuse, but a door. He worked it open with his shoulder and stepped through.

It was a small back room, almost entirely dark. He waited for his eyes to adjust.

Then he saw a chair. And in the chair, a figure.

It was in full armor, or what had been full armor, rusted so completely that the metal had gone from grey to deep orange-brown, the texture of it rough and pitted and in places eaten through entirely.

The helmet was still on, tilted slightly to the left, and the head inside it had tilted with it, the neck bones long since unable to support any weight.

The gauntleted hands were resting on the chair arms with a strange formality.

Darion looked at the skeleton for a moment.

From the length of the leg bones to the width of the shoulder plates, the size of the gauntlets and concluded that this had been a very large person.

Larger than any of his current knights. Seven feet, maybe more.

Didn’t they check for bodies when the Varrels came through?

He supposed that depended on whether anyone knew this room was here? Hidden behind a shelving unit, in a farmhouse at the edge of the territory, if the Varrels had been moving fast and taking what they could carry, they might never have looked this far.

And if the knight had been dead before they arrived, or had died during the attack, there was nobody left to report it afterward.

Darion concluded he dies during the attack. Decades ago in this chair. Alone in a back room nobody opened.

Then words appeared across his vision:

[Corpse detected. Can be revived.]