In this paper, the concepts of $K$-subset systems and $k$-well-filtered spaces are introduced, which provide another uniform approach to $d$-spaces, $s$-well-filtered spaces (i.e., $\mathcal{U}_{S}$-admissibility) and well-filtered spaces. We prove that the $k$-well-filtered reflection of any $T_{0}$ space exists. Meanwhile, we propose the definition of $k$-rank, which is an ordinal that measures how many steps from a $T_{0}$ space to a $k$-well-filtered space. Moreover, we derive that for any ordinal $\alpha$, there exists a $T_{0}$ space whose $k$-rank equals to $\alpha$. One immediate corollary is that for any ordinal $\alpha$, there exists a $T_{0}$ space whose $d$-rank (respectively, $wf$-rank) equals to $\alpha$.