Hao Ren found it difficult to understand how a massive nation like the Dragon Empire managed to operate with such efficiency and stability. The direct rule of long-lived races over short-lived races inevitably brought countless hidden dangers and complications. If His Majesty the Emperor truly was immortal because he had inherited the Dragon Soul, as the legends claimed, then his way of thinking would inevitably shift toward that of a long-lived race. Although he would accumulate tremendous wisdom and experience beyond the imagination of ordinary people in the process, it was precisely because those things were beyond ordinary people's imagination that an insurmountable chasm would form between him and his short-lived subjects.
Take a simple example: when an immortal ruler decided to establish a thousand-year plan that would benefit all his people, while his subjects could live for at most a hundred years, could such a plan—whose hope might not even be seen after ten generations of effort—truly gain the people's understanding and support?
Hao Ren had never witnessed anything similar himself, but the inspectors' databases were by no means lacking in real cases of this kind.
Yet this Dragon Empire before him... seemed to be running quite well.
The Dragon Soul Emperor possessed astonishing prestige in this nation. Majestic sculptures of His Majesty the Emperor clad in black armor could be seen everywhere in the cities. The people of the empire regarded their emperor as an eternal protector, and saw obeying his orders as a matter of course, a kind of "natural logic." It seemed that no one ever questioned any order from the imperial capital. Throughout its history of several thousand years, the unrest that had occurred within the empire could almost be counted on one hand, and every incident had been swiftly quelled.
At least, on the