A country—or rather, a faction—that wanted to develop to a certain point inevitably needed sufficient laws or rules to maintain order. Otherwise, once its scale grew, everything would descend into chaos.
Hierarchy was often established on the foundation of such laws.
But the Elf race was different. Within the Elf race, aside from the Elf King's explicitly transcendent status, the other elves actually had no real system of rank, nor many rules.
To put it bluntly, they were just a village. Whenever a problem arose, they automatically entered the stage of having the neighbors argue it out. If that did not work, the clan chief would be called in to make a ruling.
The Elf race could adopt such a model because, on the one hand, kindness was the foundation of their nature. Coupled with their generally high moral standards, everyone was quite reasonable, so there were basically no problems in their daily interactions.
On the other hand, the Elf race's population was indeed not large.
On this basis, the Elf race was further scattered into various villages according to their different branches. Each branch had its own clan chief. Normally, they each went about their own business and did not interfere with one another.
Kind people, high moral standards, a small and scattered population—only when all these factors came together did the Elf race's current loose governance model take shape.
To put it bluntly, the Elf race's state was closer to that of some loosely managed civilian organization.
But this undoubtedly had its drawbacks. From top to bottom, they had no standardized procedures for doing things.
Take the current situation, for example. Jeni's family said they wanted to give up their status in the Elf Forest and apply to join Great Zhou, becoming Great Zhou citizens.
Their family's first