Yes, at some point, people had lost the desire to have children.
In an agricultural society, once a child was raised to the age of five, they could start helping with all kinds of farm work and generating wealth.
They could serve as their parents' free labor until they turned eighteen—equivalent to working for thirteen years without pay.
The reason people in an industrial society were unwilling to raise children was that industrial work required children to reach at least sixteen before they could work.
Having children was a completely losing proposition, and after turning sixteen, they would get married by twenty. The wages they earned in between would never be handed over to their parents.
To workers, children were merely people who could sign documents for them in hospitals or nursing homes once they fell ill in old age.
One was enough. At most, they would have another as insurance.
Yet even so, even though having children was beneficial for those in agricultural society, most young farmers were still unwilling to have and raise children.
Emperor Lancelot was deeply worried. Although the total population had now reached an astonishing 45 billion,
it was still nowhere near enough.
The divine envoy had told him in his mind that the more people there were, the better. There was no upper limit.
So he decided to travel incognito.
In any case, as long as the divine envoy and the world were satisfied with him, he would never die.
Conversely, if those two were dissatisfied, he would die no matter how hard he struggled.
He did not see this as coercion, because he knew full well that there had never been absolute freedom in this world.
Even when he had been emperor before, it had been the same. He had to consider the