CHAPTER 285: CHAPTER 284: REST OF THE WORLD (1)

Rex leaned back, trying to process the weight of what he’d just seen.

He exhaled slowly, almost in disbelief. "So it’s all the same... just new labels on old blood?"

The system’s voice was calm, almost amused. "Old blood doesn’t die easily, Rex. It simply adapts. All that talk about wealth ending with the third generation... it’s just propaganda."

Rex let out a bitter smile. He used to think he was sharp, sharper than the average man. The kind who could slice through lies, peel back the layers of conspiracy, and see the machine underneath. But right now, he felt no different from the crowds he once pitied... blind, herded, and thinking themselves free.

The system spoke again, this time with a tone that almost sounded... reassuring.

"Host, you don’t need to devalue yourself. It isn’t your fault. It was never a fair fight. From the moment you took your first breath, the cage was already built around you. From the moment you were born... any human was born... you were conditioned. From bedtime stories whispered at your cradle to the textbooks drilled into your head at school, the shows you laughed at, the heroes you admired, the history you memorized, all chosen for you. Every book, every news feed, every voice that claimed to tell the truth... all of it is filtered, crafted, and fed to you by the same hands you’re only now seeing.."

Rex’s bitter smile faded. He knew the system wasn’t exaggerating. The bars of a cage didn’t need to be steel. They could be a story repeated enough times until it became the walls of your mind.

"That’s why most never see it,"

the system continued. "And those who do? They either join... or vanish."

Centuries of dynasties, revolutions, wars... and still, the same hands gripped the wheel. A truth too vast to fight, too intricate to untangle. At least for now.

The map shimmered before him. Threads loosened from the East, drifting like great metallic serpents. Slowly, deliberately, they curled westward and dipped south, tracing new lines across seas and continents.

And with each thread, he felt it, an unspoken warning. Whatever lay beyond wasn’t less controlled than Asia. It was worse.

It was never about borders. It was about reach..

...

The threads drifted over the open ocean, sliding past waves and storms as if the elements themselves parted for them. They didn’t slow, didn’t hesitate... until they coiled once more, tightening over a land bathed in heat and history. Mexico.

Most people saw Mexico as a land struggling against cartels and corruption. But to Rex, scrolling through the lineage archives, it was something else entirely... a country carved up by families older than the republic itself.

The so-called political dynasties of modern Mexico were not just influential..

many traced their ancestry back to Spanish viceroys, conquistadors, and European merchant guilds that had arrived with the colonial fleets. The Revolution of 1910 had taken their haciendas, their titles, their overt power, but it had not touched their banking networks, their shipping companies, or the hidden trusts they controlled through Swiss accounts.

Presidents came from different parties, but behind them, a handful of surnames... Salinas, Cárdenas, Madero... had rotated in and out of government for over a century. Some used legitimate politics. Others hid behind corporate frontmen. And some, Rex noted grimly, used the chaos of the drug wars not as a threat, but as a shield.

The threads swept over Mexico’s mountains and coasts, then spilled northward, crossing deserts and plains into the heart of the United States, where power pulsed beneath skyscrapers and steel. Without slowing, they climbed higher still, slipping past forests and frozen lakes until they stretched across Canada’s vast, silent expanse... a land that looked untouched, yet every mile was already claimed.

Here, Rex saw bloodlines tied to the Hudson’s Bay Company... the colonial corporation that had once claimed entire provinces as private property. Those directors’ descendants now sat on the boards of energy conglomerates, mining firms, and media networks.

Canadian politics looked calm, even dull, but beneath it lay a network of old Scottish, English, and French families who had migrated during imperial expansion. They owned the ports, the banks, the insurance houses that moved resources south into the United States and east into Europe. If Mexico was the gate to the south, Canada was the key to the north... its low-key image hiding just how deeply it was locked into the same global order.

...

From Canada’s frozen edges, the lines dipped south, slipping past the Gulf and into the spine of the Americas, stitching north to south without pause.

Central and South America had their own rules.

Argentina’s political families who had married into Italian banking dynasties; Brazil’s old landowning clans who still controlled vast tracts of the Amazon; Chile’s copper magnates whose companies had survived coups and dictatorships without losing a single mine.

In Colombia, the line between politics and cartels blurred so deeply it was impossible to know where one ended and the other began. In Peru, mining conglomerates run by the great-grandchildren of Spanish colonial officers funded both right-wing and left-wing candidates... just to ensure no matter who "won," nothing really changed.

Even the revolutions that had promised equality had only shifted the guard. The socialist leaders of Venezuela and Bolivia claimed to break from the old order, but many of their closest advisors traced ancestry back to the same merchant families who had ruled under Spanish and Portuguese crowns.

To Rex, the pattern was clear: in the Americas, ideology was just a costume. The stage remained the same.

...

When the system turned its gaze to Africa, the light dimmed, as if even it recognized how tightly the veil was drawn here.

The continent was a patchwork of ancient kingdoms, tribal monarchies, and colonial wounds that had never fully healed. Rex saw maps of the Ashanti Empire, the Kingdom of Buganda, the Zulu royal house... names from history books, yet their bloodlines still lived. They no longer wore crowns in public, but they still commanded respect, land, and loyalty.

(To Be Continued)