The Steam Lords' Council was more than just a governing body that managed the population.
In halfling society, it was also an organization encompassing both planning and creation.
At the start of each fiscal year, they drew up production plans for the cities owned by halflings. And whenever a new generation of Steam Lords took over, they supervised the incoming Lords as they set continuous short-term goals for their terms, ensuring the Steam Lords always led their people under the guidance of reason.
To achieve this, the creative institutions directly overseen by the Steam Lords were naturally vast in scale.
Professor Malcolm had once calculated that the production capacity of manufacturing institutions directly managed by the Steam Lords accounted for more than a third of the entire halfling population's output. This meant that within the halflings' unique social structure, the Steam Lords held near-absolute control over resources and production.
That was also the foundation that had kept the halflings free of any large-scale internal strife for the past thousand years.
They had a powerful regulatory government. In most cases, though, it kept a low profile and made every effort to minimize its presence.
To human civilizations still mired in feudal society, halfling society was utterly incomprehensible and impossible to imitate. Its origins lay in the sense of order etched deep into the halflings' souls; it was more like a social machine custom-built for them.
It was simply beyond the understanding of anyone outside that system.
Of course, all these conclusions came from Professor Malcolm's closing remarks when he was introducing halfling society to Murphy. Expecting Murphy, a vampire whose intelligence had somewhat atrophied from playing with knives too much, to understand this complicated political stuff was asking too much of him.
After all, he was already a slow learner when