Post Sundering Tech Level

[Enkidoh]

That's a very good point because there is some clues already in the storyline that explains this: before the Sundering the Ancients appeared to actually still have a preference for hand-cooked meals rather than simply using Creation magic to conjure food into existence, which explains why they continued to have agriculture like rearing cattle and harvesting fruit and vegetables (it appears heavy labour in these instances was probably delegated to specialist familiars rather than the Ancients themselves getting their hands dirty, their jobs seemed to be more in the 'intellectual'/creative/white-collar industries pretty much exclusively).

Even things like making tea were still done by hand (given Venat's comment during the meeting scene in Poitken Oikos that "there was plenty of hot water available" for it), and a favourite pasttime seemed to be grabbing fruit like apples from trees, so they clearly did know how to forage and make food for themselves "the primitive way" (a headcanon I have is that ready-made food like meals conjured into existence wholesale by Creation Magic is rather... bland and unappatizing, rather like as if it was made by a robot, because after all subtle differences in say cooking temperature or even the type of utensils use can wildly alter the taste and texture of a meal from one day to the next, or even the skill of the cook, and as a people who prided creativity over all else, no wonder they had this preference. ).

The main difference though is they had no biological necessity for eating other than "if they don't eat they weaken and eventually fall unconscious", but their survival did not depend on it (presumedly this was due to aether absorption - as they had enormous, almost infinite, wellsprings of aether in their bodies, it was probably enough to sustain them without requiring regular absorption from food like the Sundered races do.

But I'm rambling again like Hythlodaeus so I'll stop now. :P

EDIT: another thing I remembered is that there was a section of Elpis dedicated to crossbreeding existing plant and animal species to create new species or with new traits via natural selection/forced evolution rather than Creation Magic (the Cthonic Horns), but they were regarded by mainstream Elpis researchers with mild amusement/indifference at best, or as outright pariahs at worst, but it still shows that the Ancients themselves were not ignorant of doing things in a more 'primitive' way (one of the things they were attempting was creating new fruit varieties with different tastes and textures by grafting and hybridization, with unpredictable results).