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

"I'm sure you all already have the answer in your hearts."

Zhu Dijun stood in front of the large screen, his laser pointer drawing a heavy red circle on the portrait of Prince Ning, Zhu Chenhao.

"That's right, the Prince of Ning in history did indeed rebel during the Zhengde era! We'll discuss the specific details of this rebellion and its darkly humorous, surreal ending later. Now, let's rewind a bit and return to an old topic!"

On the whiteboard, two large characters were written heavily.

[Leopard! House!]

"Yes, it's the famous Leopard House!"

Zhu Dijun tapped the blackboard, his eyes sharp. "As we mentioned earlier, after suppressing the rebellion of Liu Liu and Liu Qi, Zhu Houzhao, in order to regain military power, frantically adopted 127 sons and even forcibly kept the border troops who participated in the suppression in the capital."

"But these menacing border troops have entered the capital; they need a place to stay, right? The Ministry of War and the Five Military Commissions certainly won't make room for them. So, Zhu Houzhao made the decision directly—to expand the Leopard House!"

The time on the big screen suddenly froze.

[October of the seventh year of the Zhengde reign!]

"Note this timing. At this point, there was still more than a year before the fire that burned down the palace in the ninth year of the Zhengde reign, which I mentioned earlier. At this critical juncture, Zhu Houzhao directly issued an imperial edict to the Ministry of Revenue: [I want to add two hundred rooms to the Leopard House to house the Imperial Guards. The national treasury should provide the funds!]"

In the live stream, Zhu Dijun suddenly let out an extremely mocking sneer.

"Do my family members think that the civil service, which controls the national treasury and the imperial court, would provide this money?"

"Absolutely not!"

Zhu Dijun slammed his hands on the table, leaned forward, and spoke in an extremely exaggerated tone.

"The Grand Secretaries Li Dongyang and Yang Tinghe, along with their group of high-ranking civil officials, were absolutely furious upon hearing this imperial edict! They split into two groups and launched a frenzied attack in the court!"

"The first group pointed at Zhang Mao and his gang of Beijing garrison generals in the Five Military Commands and cursed them! What did they curse? They cursed them as a bunch of good-for-nothings! They received the best treatment in the Ming Dynasty and were equipped with the most advanced firearms, but they couldn't even defeat a group of bandits made up of horsemen right under their noses, and in the end, the border troops from other places had to clean up their mess!"

"The second group directly targeted Zhu Houzhao, who was sitting on the dragon throne!"

On the screen, several illusory images of memorials from censors and officials appeared.

Zhu Dijun pointed to these memorials and read out their subtext with great emotion.

The civil officials cried out in despair: "Your Majesty! When you got married, you treated us like pigs to be slaughtered, staging an unprecedented marriage fraud that swindled 240,000 taels of silver from the Cabinet to fund the Imperial Treasury! Now you want money again? No money! Not a single coin!"

The entire online audience burst into laughter. Everyone still vividly remembered the marriage scam joke from the Ming Dynasty version of "Let the Bullets Fly".

In the seventh year of the Zhengde reign of the Ming Dynasty, at the Leopard Chamber.

Zhu Houzhao sat in his chair, listening to the complaints on the screen, a cold, sharp smile curving his lips.

No money?

He knew all too well the true colors of these civil officials. The profits from smuggling in Jiangnan had been paid off, and the hidden farmland of officials and gentry could yield tens of millions of bushels of grain a year; they simply didn't want to spend their money on imperial power.

On the sky, Zhu Dijun's smile faded, and his eyes gradually turned cold.

"Zhu Houzhao, of course, refused to compromise with the civil service group's claims of poverty and resistance! Because he had never forgotten the humiliating mutiny on August 11th of the fifth year of Zhengde's reign!"

A blood-dripping phantom of a butcher's knife once again looms across the center of the screen.

"That mutiny taught him that these scholars dressed like beasts could join forces with powerful nobles to cut off his hands and feet at any time. After suppressing the rebellion of Liu Liu and Liu Qi, Zhu Houzhao took advantage of this rare political lull to begin an extremely dangerous micromanagement!"

"First and foremost, it's about external relations!"

Zhu Dijun's laser pointer swept across the northwestern defense line of the Ming Dynasty.

"Zhu Houzhao once again bypassed the Ministry of War and dispatched his most trusted eunuchs to guard the nine important border towns, including Xuanfu and Datong! Moreover, he frequently replaced the military commanders guarding these towns with swift and decisive measures! He wanted to completely separate the command of the Northwest field army from the civil service system and firmly grasp it in his own hands again!"

"Secondly, internally!"

On the large screen, two portraits of military generals appeared. Next to them were the imperial surnames bestowed upon them and their original names.

Adopted Son: Zhu Tai (Xu Tai)!

[Adopted Son: Zhu Bin (Jiang Bin)]!

Zhu Dijun spoke slowly and deliberately, his voice as heavy as a thousand-pound hammer.

Zhu Houzhao knew that controlling the border troops alone was not enough; the Five Military Commissions in the capital were also a malignant tumor. He needed to plant his own daggers within the capital's military!

In the first month of the eighth year of the Zhengde reign, Zhu Houzhao found an extremely absurd but also extremely effective excuse. He issued an edict declaring that his adopted son, Zhu Tai, the deputy commander-in-chief of Xuanfu and the deputy military governor, who was historically known as Xu Tai, was injured and needed to be transferred to the capital to recuperate!

"And what happened? While he was recuperating from his illness, Zhu Houzhao issued a direct order, commanding Zhu Tai to take over the newly formed 'Dare-to-Be Battalion' of the Beijing Garrison!"

"Immediately afterwards, Zhu Houzhao made another stroke of his pen, ordering his other adopted son, Zhu Bin, who had killed countless people on the border and was later vilified by civil officials as an unparalleled traitor, to directly take over another trump card of the Beijing Garrison—the Shenwei Battalion!"

boom!

When Zhu Di heard about this operation during the Yongle reign of the Ming Dynasty, he couldn't help but slap the table in admiration.

"Brilliant tactic! Using the pretext of training troops to lure them into the capital, then directly seizing military power. This kid is an absolute genius when it comes to political maneuvering!"

In the live stream, Zhu Dijun gripped the table tightly with both hands, the cold light in his eyes almost piercing through the screen.

"Family members, two elite Imperial Guard units have fallen into the hands of Zhu Houzhao's adopted son. This move is like plunging two bloody daggers into the heart of the civil service and the Five Military Commissions!"

The high-ranking civil officials in the imperial court were instantly on high alert!

On the whiteboard, a thick red line runs from the words "military power" to "ledger"!

"Given Zhu Houzhao's past practices in implementing new policies, once he tightens his grip on the knife, his next step will undoubtedly be to release the secret police and imperial guards to re-examine the accounts in Jiangnan, to investigate their smuggling activities, and to investigate their land annexations!"

"Cutting off someone's livelihood is like killing their parents. In order to protect their interests and prevent the emperor from seizing power, these feudal scholar-officials, who were full of righteous words, did something heinous and disgusting that would make every Chinese person in later generations feel utterly nauseous!"

Zhu Dijun slammed his gavel down.

boom!

Four large, scarlet characters, like four nuclear bombs, crashed onto the live stream's public screen!

[Precise! Accurate! Target! Border!]

Across countless worlds and timelines, the entire arena fell into a deathly silence.

What is meant by "precision border infiltration"?

As Zhu Dijun moved closer to the camera, his speech became increasingly rapid, and his voice became frighteningly hoarse.

"Starting from the eighth year of the Zhengde reign, the northwestern border of the Ming Dynasty was frequently under threat. But the strangest thing was that each invasion by the Mongol Tatars seemed to be swift and precise, as if they had a full-screen view and were guided by the BeiDou Navigation Satellite System!"

The map on the big screen was flashing red lights wildly.

"If Zhu Houzhao assigns a trusted general from the imperial faction to a fortress in Xuanfu, the Tatar cavalry will precisely bypass the other weak defenses and launch a devastating attack on the fortress!"

"Whichever adopted son Zhu Houzhao sends to the front lines to oversee the battle, the main force of the Tatars will ambush him along his marching route!"

"The enemy knows everything about the Ming Dynasty's personnel movements, troop deployments, and even the locations of its grain stores! They are using the sharpest scimitars to physically eliminate disobedient members of the imperial faction within the Ming court's civil service!"

Zhu Dijun ripped off his tie, pointed at the screen, and roared angrily.

"Family members, there are no nomadic tribes with divine wisdom and strategy! This is clearly a traitor! A sellout! Those civil officials in the Ming court, dressed in their crimson robes and reading the Four Books and Five Classics, are secretly acting as spies, frantically selling the nation's top military secrets to the Mongols!"

"They're using the Mongols' sword to weaken the emperor's elite troops! This is true treason!"

After a brief period of silence, the chat in the live stream exploded like a tsunami.

Countless modern netizens were enraged by this blatant betrayal!

"Holy crap!! These bastards! They're even giving directions to the enemy for their own internal strife!"

"The case is solved! The whole case is solved! No wonder the border defenses were always so vulnerable; it turns out the headquarters was full of enemy spies!"

"These aren't civil officials; they're a bunch of complete traitors! Traitors!"

["Some extreme guys said before that even executing two corrupt officials from the Song and Ming dynasties once wouldn't be enough. Now I think, even if they were all wiped out, it wouldn't be a waste!"]

"These people who traded the lives of frontline soldiers for their families' mansions and fertile lands in Jiangnan deserve to go to the deepest hell!"

Myriad Realms and Spacetime

On the borders of the Ming Dynasty throughout history.

In countless villages and towns ravaged by Mongol cavalry, the people of the Ming Dynasty looked up at the sky, tears of blood streaming from their eyes.

Datong Town.

An old soldier who had lost an arm knelt on the scorched ruins, roaring in anguish to the sky.

"No wonder...no wonder the Tartars were able to sneak into our outposts in the dark! No wonder the gunpowder transport team was intercepted and killed beforehand!"

"So it was a powerful official in the capital who betrayed us! Heavens! Open your eyes and see the state of the world!"

Throughout the entire border region, cries of grief and anger resounded through the heavens. At this moment, the morale of the army and the people was ignited with an unprecedented hatred towards those powerful figures in the imperial court.

During the Hongwu reign of the Ming Dynasty.

Zhu Yuanzhang's imperial sword had been dulled by the blows, and the entire imperial desk in the Fengtian Hall had been chopped into pieces of wood.

Old Zhu was so angry that his eyes were bloodshot, like an evil spirit crawling out of hell, staring intently at the civil and military officials kneeling on the ground below.

"Fine, very well!" Zhu Yuanzhang gritted his teeth, his voice so cold it felt like falling into an ice cave. "We're fighting the Mongols on the front lines, and you're feeding the Tartars intelligence from behind. Mao Xiang! Arrest the Ministers of Personnel and War! Throw them in the imperial prison! We'll skin them alive one by one!"

During the Chongzhen era of the Ming Dynasty.

At the foot of Coal Hill.

Emperor Chongzhen, Zhu Youjian, who was originally preparing to hang himself, stared blankly at the four characters "precisely targeting the border" on the sky.

He recalled how every time he tried to deploy troops and launch a surprise attack on Yezhupi, he was always ambushed and wiped out by the Qing army.

"So... the Cabinet and the Ministry of War had already betrayed me."

Emperor Chongzhen gave a bitter laugh, threw away the white silk in his hand, and his eyes revealed a completely dark and insane madness.

Inside a modern live streaming studio.

As Zhu Dijun watched the screen filled with raging anger, he slowly picked up his water glass and moistened his throat.

He took a deep breath, his eyes like two sharp awls, staring straight at the camera.