Mountains and Rivers
Alex III's arrangements with People with Abilities (PA) worked.
He provided them and their families with money, and they used their abilities whenever and however Alex III wanted.
Nevertheless, even with all of that, the realization of the world would take a while.
Alex III could predict a lot of things using Dream Fog. He tried to find out when the world would become real. It was so far in the future that he only vaguely felt it would take millions of years.
For humans, 100 years is a long time. 1000 is unimaginable; civilizations collapse and come into being in 1000 years.
10,000 years is enough time for humans to progress from cave dwellers to modern humans.
As for 100,000 years, it's so long that it is incomprehensible to mortals.
Millions of years are already far outside the comprehension of mortals.
Fortunately, Alex III is no longer a mortal; he is a vampire with an endless lifespan.
But, even he is unsure how he would change in millions of years. To be honest, he is afraid of what will happen.
He is only a bit older than 200 years now.
When one compares him now to 100 years ago, he has changed a lot. His looks are the same, but his attitude and how he looks at the world have changed.
Who knows how he would change in a million years?
In the last 100 years, the concept of a 'county' or 'kingdom' has been eroded. It's because of the Mountains and Rivers Alliance.
With Alex III as its president, the alliance consistently draws more and more power to itself. Now, individual countries are all subject to the Mountains and Rivers Alliance laws.
The Mountains and Rivers Alliance has become like a big country, with all the previous countries as its states and provinces.
Rules of Alex III about ranking people now apply to all countries, and the ranks are no longer issued by the Alex Kingdom but by the Mountains and Rivers Alliance.
It could be said that the Alex Kingdom as a country has lost much of its authority. But, as Alex III was the president of the Mountains and Rivers Alliance too, in effect, nothing changed.
Alex III made some modifications to make the ranking system suitable for the whole world.
As the Mountains and Rivers Alliance's president, he received the super rank.
Heads of countries would be considered rank 1. Ranks 2 and 3 are reserved for the royal family. Ranks 4 and 5 are for ministers or heads of government departments, rank 6 is for deputy heads, and the rest remained unchanged.
Ranks could only be granted by the approval of the Mountains and Rivers Alliance; in practice, it means Alex III can now grant rank or revoke the ranks of everyone in the world.
His arrangement with nobles worked as he intended. Even the lowest-ranking government official is rank 9, which means the highest noble who is not a government official must bow to the lowest-ranking government official.
The nobles are rank 10, regardless of whether they are a duke or baron. This policy caused all nobles to look for government jobs desperately.
Alex III was happy to see this. He granted nobles ranks of mayors and governors.
Mayors can be rank 7 or 8, depending on the size of the city, and governors are rank 6. Village chiefs would be granted a rank of 9.
But, becoming official government workers means they became subject to the supervision of the Minister of Interior, a rank 5 minister.
In effect, the nobles have all been directly subjected to the government and lost all their autonomy.
The prime minister position, a rank 4 official, has been occupied by Lisa for over a century.
Even normal humans live up to 500 if they consume precious resources, so Lisa has a few hundred years more to live.
Alex III doesn't want Lisa to become a vampire. She is not loyal enough. He still remembers a century ago, during the candle battle, when she doubted him.
As a result of her, a woman, being the prime minister and setting an example, today, women working is normal. It is even expected.
This is what Alex III wanted to see. The workforce is much larger, and so is the tax revenue.
He had made other changes.
He removed the previous crown prince and installed his youngest girl, Aurora, as crown princess.
Previously, girls couldn't become heads of countries. But Alex III changed this. To be honest, it doesn't matter who the king of the Alex Kingdom is. Alex III will always remain the person with the strongest force.
Now, the crown prince or princess position is primarily symbolic. Alex III will never die and never abdicate his position.
Even if he decides to abdicate the throne one day, his voice will always remain the loudest in the Alex kingdom.
It was just a show to improve the standing of women so more women would feel comfortable working.
With a proclamation as president of the Mountains and River Alliance, he ordered that countries not discriminate against girls when it comes to succession to the throne.
It was an unbelievable intrusion into other countries' internal matters, but by this point, nobody had the backbone to resist Alex III, so they all complied.
Today, a few countries have women as kings.
In the last century, there has been a rebellion in the territory of the Clements Empire. Alex III was happy to see it.
He has been running out of war prisoners for his snacks and Dream Fog predictions.
He ordered his massive army to attack and capture all. Even people who didn't rebel, as long as they were in the Clements Empire, were arrested.
Alex III said, 'You should have prevented it; going along with it is the same as actively supporting the rebellion.'
Since then, he has been using them as material to predict the future using Dream Fog.
People with abilities also require people as materials.
Abilities like granting wishes or sending someone to the past and future would need a person who believes in them. The person will be sent to a sub-world or sub-timeline and disappear from this world.
Alex III needs a steady supply of people to maintain all of this.
Lately, however, there have been a few problems.
The problem with more women working is less fertility overall.
The population growth nearly stopped throughout the world.
Alex III had a solution for it. He set a policy in which women could reach rank 11 as long as they gave birth to three children.
Commoners are usually rank 11 to 13.
Having a better ranking is essential in all aspects of life.
Better opportunities, free services, lower healthcare costs, people of lower rank must bow down to you, and you can even receive money and food for free from the government.
In short, the proposal was very attractive.
Usually, only doctors and people who are very educated could get rank 11, but with this rule, only by giving birth could they reach the highest rank a commoner could.
He didn't expand the rule to the husbands because it would cost a lot of money to grant ranks to people.
Alex III stuck with the carrot for now and didn't bring out the stick. If the result is good, it would be fine, but if the population growth remains low, he would bring out the stick and demote women with no children.
He didn't let men off either.
Promoting the ranks of so many commoners cost the government a lot of money, so he increased taxes on men to provide resources.
He called it 'Pop' tax.
If the man's wife gives birth to three children, the husband would be exempted from pop tax for 4 years.
If they gave birth to 5 children, the man would be completely exempt from the pop tax.
If they give birth to ten children, both men and women would be exempted from all taxes for life.
Alex III believes in central control of everything by himself. He saw no problem in intruding into people's private lives like this.
As of today, the population growth has been going up steadily.
A higher rank is desirable. Today, nearly all married couples consider having three children as the baseline.
Without having children, the husband has to pay a lot of money as pop tax.
Another problem that came up is many women never marry.
They can work, live independently, and don't have to pay pop tax, so why marry?
Alex III ordered single women also to be included in the pop tax. If you don't want to marry, then you must pay pop tax like men.
Alex III didn't include women in the pop tax because they already bear most of the burden of having children. But if you don't marry, you will not have any extra burden, so no tax exemption.
These policies, combined, mostly solved the population crisis.
Money and social standing, in general, are very effective ways of controlling people. The ranking system made it easy for Alex III to reward or punish people.
The threat of their rank demoting was enough to force everyone to play by the rules.
In this way, the entire world remained in Alex III's hands entirely.
By now, he has created 1000 vampires and stationed them as his special agents worldwide. His 'vampire agents' are the most feared throughout the world.
Their rank is 4th, equal to the prime minister. Of course, they can't interfere with government affairs, even if they have the same rank as the prime minister.
But, as direct agents of Alex III, even kings with rank 1 must be very respectful to them.
The vampire agents have the duty to find people with abilities, investigate any corruption, look for plans of rebellion, and, in general, do their best to keep the world stable and under Alex III's rule.
They detected the rebellion in Clements Kingdom months in advance; it's just that Alex III, who needed prisoners, wanted it to happen, so he didn't prevent it.
Alex III himself has changed.
Today, he has become a bit kinder toward children. Before, he would have killed families without batting an eye, but now, he tries to keep the children alive if possible.
He also only uses adults as materials for Dream Fog.
Some people get only more ruthless as they age, and some get kinder. As of now, Alex III has become kinder.
He has also become an environmentalist. He likes to preserve nature as it is.
His desire for control, however, has only become stronger. He likes to control everything, and anything not in his firm grasp makes him very uncomfortable.
Like this, Alex III sat on his throne, occasionally changing the Mountains and Rivers Alliance policy to address challenges that appeared as the years passed.