Sky Curtain: The opening scene explains the four major cases of the Ming Dynasty plus the early Ming

In the live stream, the raging fire in the Forbidden City gradually died down, replaced by an eerie silence in the imperial court.

Judy Jun leaned back in his gaming chair, toying with an exquisite folding fan in his hand, a mocking smile playing on his lips.

"Family members, those two old foxes, Liu Jian and Xie Qian, originally wanted to play a trick of 'retreating to advance'."

"They believed that the Ming Dynasty could not function without them. As soon as they submitted their resignations, the young Emperor Wuzong would surely be so frightened that he would kneel outside the Qianqing Palace, begging the two 'regent ministers' to stay and take charge of the overall situation."

"And what happened? Zhu Houzhao promptly forced them to resign without notice, even forfeiting their pensions!"

The folding fan in Zhu Dijun's hand snapped shut with a sharp sound.

The two bigwigs slunk away, leaving in disgrace. Now, the lower-ranking officials were in complete panic; they realized they'd been ripped off!

"How could we just let the protective umbrella disappear like that?"

"Therefore, Lü Chong, a supervising secretary of the Ministry of Justice, was the first to step forward and submitted a memorial to Zhu Houzhao, putting pressure on him, saying that the two senior officials were related to the safety of the country, and Your Majesty must bow your head and persuade them to stay!"

"Immediately afterwards, the censor Chen Lin also jumped out and followed suit, talking at length about how ancestral rules cannot be violated and that the monarch should have the virtue of respecting the elderly."

The civil officials of all realms and timelines were all staring intently at the sky.

According to the usual script, at this point the emperor should be forced by public opinion to reluctantly issue an edict to recall the old minister.

Zhu Dijun scoffed, looking at the replicas of the memorials on the screen as if they were idiots.

"Zhu Houzhao's attitude towards these clowns was extremely simple and crude."

"Try to keep me? Keep me my ass!"

"Does he really think he doesn't know how these people drained the resources of Emperor Xiaozong's reign? Not executing those two old Bi Dengs on the spot is already the greatest mercy Zhu Houzhao could show!"

"Faced with Chen Lin, a censor who was so persistent, Zhu Houzhao didn't even bother to scold him."

On the screen, an imperial edict crashed down.

"Simply strip Chen Lin of his former high-ranking position as a censor in the capital, and send him thousands of miles away to Guangdong to serve as a deputy county magistrate!"

The era of the Zhengde reign of the Ming Dynasty.

Chen Lin, who was originally writing furiously with a righteous expression, preparing to submit a memorial to persuade Liu Jian to stay, suddenly dropped his brush on the Xuan paper.

The ink spread out.

He stared blankly at the sky.

Guangdong? Deputy county head? That's a barren land teeming with miasma!

On the sky, Zhu Dijun's finishing blows arrived as expected, each one fatal.

"Family members, the most foolish people in the workplace are like Chen Lin, who are used as pawns and are even complacent about it."

"He thought that by standing up for his mentor and colleagues, he would surely receive protection and promotion from the civil service in the future."

"But he was so wrong!"

Zhu Dijun tapped the screen with his finger, speaking slowly and deliberately.

"In real history, until Emperor Wuzong died and until the next emperor ascended the throne, a new round of civil officials began to divide up the interests of the court."

"Chen Lin, who once devoted himself wholeheartedly to the civil service, is still firmly mired in the quagmire of Guangdong!"

"He was never transferred back to the capital!"

"Isn't that a loss? You treated your colleagues like brothers, but they only used you as a stepping stone! They climbed the ladder by stepping on your corpse, and who remembers you, the sucker who died in the south?"

thump!

In the Zhengde era, Chen Lin's legs went weak, and she collapsed to the ground.

A chill ran up my tailbone and straight to the top of my head.

"No... I'm not going! I'm not going to submit this memorial!"

He frantically tore at the memorial on the table, ripping the document filled with righteous indignation to shreds, and stuffed it directly into his mouth, swallowing it whole.

For the greater good! Chen Lin wants to stay in the capital and comfortably be an official; let whoever wants to go to Guangdong go!

The viewers in the modern live stream burst into laughter.

"Jun-ge's workplace skills are amazing! Chen Lin is a typical scapegoat!"

[“Civil service group: Good brother, you go first, we'll divide the compensation!”]

["Zhu Houzhao's move was ruthless; he threw you to Guangdong to eat dirt, and saw who would dare to stand up for you then!"]

Zhu Dijun picked up his teacup and gently blew on it.

"The coup attempt in Beijing was forcibly suppressed, but the civil service group is not going to admit defeat."

"Family members, the Ming Dynasty had two sets of officials."

"When things went wrong in Beijing, those people in Nanjing started causing trouble."

On the big screen, the timeline jumped rapidly.

[The first month of the second year of the Zhengde reign.]

"Seeing that the situation was not good, Lü Chong, a supervising secretary of the Ministry of Justice, secretly passed on the news from the capital to his colleagues in Nanjing."

"Under the coordination of certain unnamed 'mysterious big shots'—you know, it's nothing more than Liu Jian, Xie Qian, or Li Dongyang."

"Lin Han, Minister of War in Nanjing, and Lu Yan, Prefect of Yingtian Prefecture, these two high-ranking officials directly intervened and set the tone!"

"They led the six supervising secretaries of the Nanjing Ministry of Justice and thirteen circuit censors in a massive collective impeachment!"

"The target is Gao Feng, one of the Eight Tigers!"

Judy Jun's voice gradually lowered, revealing an extremely suppressed prelude to a storm.

"Family members, are they really just impeaching a eunuch?"

On the screen, a massive memorial to the emperor, thousands of words long, was unfurled.

The words highlighted in red stung everyone's eyes.

"In this memorial intended for the entire world, they pointed their fingers at the sixteen-year-old Zhu Houzhao and vehemently denounced him!"

"Scold him for not going to school! Scold him for not attending court!"

"Scold him for not doing his job properly!"

"The most vicious thing is that they actually spread rumors that the emperor didn't have any children because he had homosexual tendencies and liked men!"

Finally, they bestowed upon this young emperor, who had only been on the throne for two years, a title that would shake the entire world—

"A monarch who brought about the downfall of his kingdom!"

boom!

The era of Hongwu in the Ming Dynasty.

Zhu Yuanzhang kicked over the dragon table in front of him, his eyes bloodshot and his chest heaving violently.

"This is outrageous! This is outrageous!"

"A sixteen-year-old boy, forced to abstain from women by them, is now being accused of having homosexual tendencies!"

"Who gave these beasts the audacity to call the descendants of the Zhu family rulers who brought about the downfall of their kingdom!"

Clang!

Beside him, Crown Prince Zhu Biao, for the first time ever, drew a guard's sword and slashed it at a palace pillar.

The crown prince, usually known for his benevolence, was now ashen-faced: "Father, kill them! Those officials in Nanjing must be killed to appease public anger!"

Zhengde Era.

In the main hall of the Leopard Room.

Zhu Houzhao did not fly into a rage; he simply sat there quietly, watching the vicious words displayed on the sky.

Suddenly, he laughed.

He laughed like a wolf cornered on the edge of a cliff, ready to tear its prey to shreds.

"A king who has lost his country... good, very good."

Zhu Houzhao drew the Emperor's Sword and pressed the sharp blade against his cheek, feeling its icy chill.

"Since you insist on forcing me to become the ruler of a fallen kingdom, then I will fight my way out and create a just and prosperous world!"

On the sky, Zhu Dijun slammed his gavel.

"Zhu Houzhao is furious!"

"He completely abandoned all compromises and bottom lines!"

"What 'pure and upright civil officials,' what 'great Confucian scholars of Jiangnan,' it's all utter bullshit!"

"Zhu Houzhao issued a ruthless imperial edict: The Embroidered Uniform Guard is to march south! The imperial guards are deployed in all directions!"

On the screen, countless Imperial Guards dressed in flying fish robes surged like a black torrent along the Grand Canal, heading straight for Nanjing.

Wherever the imperial guards passed, the officials were terrified!

"No trial is needed, no joint trial by the three judicial departments is needed!"

"The Imperial Guards stormed into various government offices in Nanjing and arrested people on the spot!"

"Lin Han, the Minister of War in Nanjing, and Lu Yan, the Prefect of Yingtian Prefecture, who led the riot, were demoted three ranks, stripped of all political privileges, and sent back to their hometowns to live on dirt!"

"As for the key members who joined the riot, there were eighteen people including Lü Chong, Ai Hong, Dai Chong, and Yan Wei."

Zhu Dijun's eyes were extremely cold.

"Lock them all up and escort them to the capital!"

"Within the Forbidden City, in front of all the civil and military officials of the Ming Dynasty, they were all stripped down to their pants and flogged!"

"After the carnage, all eighteen individuals were dismissed from their public positions and will never be rehired!"

In all the myriad realms and timelines, there was utter silence.

All that remained were the dull thuds of the Imperial Guards wielding their batons against the sky and the mournful screams of the civil officials.

This is the thunderous wrath of an emperor.

At the age of sixteen, Zhu Houzhao used a blood-stained court rod to declare to all civil officials: The master of the Ming Dynasty is surnamed Zhu!

however.

Just when everyone thought this wave of purges had reached its peak.

Zhu Dijun suddenly stopped typing.

He leaned forward, his face filling the entire screen, his eyes becoming extremely eerie and profound.

"Family members."

"In the list of eighteen people who were beaten bloody by court flogging, or rather, in this group of officials who supported the riots."

"Hidden within is an extremely special man, who was even elevated to a god-like status in later generations."

On the big screen, a statue appeared, dressed in a blue robe, with his hands behind his back and a compassionate look in his eyes.

"At the time, he was just a minor official in the Military Selection Department of the Ministry of War."

"Because he supported the riots in Nanjing, he was also pinned to a gold brick by Emperor Wuzong and severely beaten with forty strokes of the cane."

"Subsequently, he was demoted to Longchang in Guizhou, an extremely remote area, to serve as a lowly postmaster."

"It was there that he comprehended a world-shaking martial art, becoming the only sage in the Ming Dynasty!"

Countless ancient scholars held their breath the moment they saw that statue.

The Jiajing era and the Wanli era.

Countless Confucian scholars knelt down and kowtowed.

"It's the Sage King!"

"It's Yangming Gong!"

In the modern live stream room, the barrage of comments was also going crazy, with everyone exclaiming that this was the pinnacle of thought in the Ming Dynasty.

However, Zhu Dijun's next words were like a nuclear bomb, exploding directly in everyone's minds.

"That's right, he is Wang Shouren, Wang Yangming, the founder of 'the School of Mind'!"

Judy Jun suddenly raised his hand, pointing at the towering statue of the saint, his eyes flashing with extreme fanaticism and cruelty.

"but!"

"Here, I want to tell everyone with utmost responsibility."

"This saint you revere as a god, this great Ming Dynasty thinker who championed 'extending innate knowledge'!"

"More than a decade later, he played an extremely terrifying and dark role!"

Judy Jun's voice ripped through the night sky.

"He—was the one who later personally caused Emperor Wuzong Zhu Houzhao's drowning and even poisoned him to death..."

"One of the ultimate monarch killers!!!"

boom!!!

The world collapsed completely at that moment.