Chapter 629: Ainz's past
Slowly, Alexander felt that Ainz was getting too emotional in his storytelling as he got faster and faster speaking.
"At the beginning of the twenty-second century, with the collapse of the primary-sector industries due to advanced environmental destruction and the drying up of crops, there were food riots in all corners of the world. The riots eventually turned into a coup d'etat, and when the politicians were targeted by the people's discontent, they were tried by the mob French revolution style.
"Into the power vacuum left by the halt of government functions, due to the coup d'etat, came the huge conglomerates, which seized the legislative, executive, and judicial powers. They succeeded in taking over countries around the world.
"But the ones who caused the environmental destruction in the first place were the huge conglomerates. If they had protected the environment, there wouldn't have been food shortages or riots. Looking at it that way, it seemed like the world was being manipulated by the conglomerates for a long time. We humans brought our own doom by playing right into their hands.
"Meanwhile, those in the conglomerates had taken refuge in complete environmental cities called arcologies. So arcologies ended up becoming states with cities built around them. At certain times for various reasons, arcologies went to war with one another. But even then, only the poor died.
"The government had basically ceased functioning, and police remained only in name. Naturally, public safety worsened, and gangs of thieves and hackers operated in the open, but society as a whole wasn't actually thrown into chaos because that was how the rich made money. Most people quietly commuted to an office and put in their hours.
"Employees were treated cruelly, but they never complained, and almost no one rebelled against their administration. The reason they didn't was that anyone who revolted against their company would have been unable to survive in that world.
"After the huge conglomerates took over the countries, under the pretext of "getting public expenditure under control," the compulsory education system was dismantled but their true aim was robbing the poor of their ability to think.
"Parents who wanted their children to be able to get a halfway decent job still sent them to school but it wasn't easy for the poor to scrape together tuition. There were many who bent over backwards and ruined their health working to pay for it. Really, elementary education shouldn't have cost that much, but prices soared because the wealthy wanted to rob the poor of educational opportunities. It was a cycle of hellish life you couldn't get out of even if you wanted to.