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

"Boom! Boom! Boom!"

On the big screen, the AI-generated animation was absolutely stunning. Those enormous "Divine Fire Crows" drew deadly arcs in mid-air, plunging directly into the densest charging formation of the Mongol cavalry.

The gunpowder inside exploded with a deafening roar, unleashing a barrage of caltrops and short arrows coated with deadly poison, raining down like a death storm from every angle!

The mournful cries of warhorses, the shattered limbs and torn pieces from the gunpowder explosion, mixed with the blood mist filling the sky, turned the entire Yingzhou Plain into a living hell.

"See that? This is what you call technological superiority! This is what you call the military industry of the Ming Dynasty!"

Zhu Dijun slammed his hands on the live-streaming table, sending historical materials flying. His eyes were bloodshot, and he roared at the top of his lungs.

"Dayan Khan thought he had encountered a lamb to the slaughter, but instead he ran headlong into a heavily armed human meat grinder!"

Inside the modern live stream room, the viewers were completely dumbfounded.

"Holy crap!! This is drones spraying water!"

"So the Ming Dynasty really did possess such weapons of mass destruction! A devastating blow!"

"With firearms against melee weapons, Dayan Khan is truly terrified!"

Zhu Dijun grabbed the specially protected copy of the "Imperial Jade Disc" and shoved it right in front of the camera.

"After his first charge was blasted apart by the Divine Fire Crows, Dayan Khan refused to believe it! He was unwilling to suffer such a great loss!"

Zhu Dijun's finger slammed heavily onto a line of yellowed ancient Chinese characters.

"Let's see how this private royal file is written! The original text is very clear—[The following day, Dayan Khan fought again, and was defeated once more. Dayan Khan was wounded and retreated]!"

On the whiteboard, three bloody characters were scribbled in bold red marker: "[Seriously Injured, Retired]!"

"The next day, Dayan Khan amassed a large army and launched another fierce attack. However, he was once again repelled by the Ming Dynasty's firearms and heavy cavalry! This time, even Dayan Khan himself, the Mongol Khan, was severely wounded by the Ming's firearms amidst the chaos of battle!"

Zhu Dijun's laughter was filled with extreme pleasure. "Fifty thousand main force troops have been utterly humiliated by the Ming Dynasty for two consecutive days, their commander is seriously injured. How can they possibly fight this battle? The Mongols can only abandon their armor and flee in disarray!"

At this moment, the screen suddenly went dark, leaving only the extremely disgusting record from the Manchu Qing Dynasty's "History of Ming" mentioned earlier—"[Sixteen heads were beheaded]."

"Now, family."

Judy Jun's face instantly darkened, like the deathly stillness before a storm.

"Let's tear apart this colossal lie that has deceived the Chinese people for hundreds of years!"

He swiped away the History of Ming on the screen and brought up the second half of the same page of the Imperial Jade Register of the Ming Dynasty.

"Look at how the Royal Family records the losses from this battle!"

Zhu Dijun read out the sentence, word by word, a sentence that was enough to change the perception of history.

"[Sixteen were decapitated; the rest are negligible!]"

Four enormous characters—【不可计之】—suddenly filled the entire live stream room!

"What the hell is 'uncountable'?!" Zhu Dijun grabbed a laser pointer and frantically banged on the whiteboard. "Those bastards who wrote the history for the Qing Dynasty, and that group of civil officials, they took things out of context, forcibly deleting the second half of the sentence! They only left 'sixteen beheaded,' using it to mock the Ming Dynasty for using all its national strength to kill only sixteen Mongols!"

Zhu Dijun moved closer to the camera, his eyes filled with extreme mockery and anger.

"Use your brains! After being bombarded at close range by those gunpowder-filled iron lumps like the Divine Fire Flying Crow, and then volleyed by the muskets of the Ming Dynasty's Divine Machine Battalion, how could those Mongol soldiers possibly survive with intact corpses?! The entire area outside Yingzhou City was littered with charred remains, half-buried warhorses, and countless mangled limbs!"

"The military law of the Ming Dynasty stipulates that military merit is earned by collecting intact heads! Do you expect the soldiers on the front lines to piece together heads from a pile of minced meat? If you bring half a large intestine and half an eyeball to the Ministry of War, do you think those civil officials will give you military merit?! Those sixteen heads were the unlucky ones that were finally found on the outskirts of the city, the ones that weren't blown to pieces!"

The entire online audience was instantly chilled to the bone.

"Holy crap!! So that's the truth!"

["Countless lives were blown to pieces! It was forcibly altered to say only sixteen people were killed!"]

"The writing tools of the Manchu Qing dynasty and its civil officials were poisonous! Absolutely poisonous!"

Inside the Fengtian Hall during the Hongwu reign of the Ming Dynasty.

As Zhu Yuanzhang listened to the explanations on the screen, he looked up and let out a burst of extremely joyful laughter, which echoed throughout the hall for a long time.

"Great! Well done!"

Zhu Yuanzhang slammed his hand on the imperial desk, tears streaming down his face.

"This is the true army of our Great Ming! The number of soldiers torn to pieces is countless! Those pedantic civil officials who want to erase the achievements of our descendants are simply delusional!"

During the Yongle reign, Zhu Di drew his imperial sword and cleaved off a corner of a palace pillar with a single stroke, his eyes gleaming.

"His descendant Zhu Houzhao truly possessed the unparalleled prowess I displayed during my northern expedition against the Mongols!"

"The battle was won, but Zhu Houzhao's butcher's knife did not stop there."

On the screen above, Zhu Dijun's voice rang out again, carrying an even sharper killing intent. The timeline on the large screen suddenly jolted!

[November of the twelfth year of Zhengde's reign, winter]!

"After defeating the Mongols in October, did the emperor return to the capital? No!"

Zhu Dijun switched to an extremely vast map of the northeastern frontier of the Ming Dynasty.

"In the dead of winter, November, Zhu Houzhao uncovered a highly secret intelligence network of moles!"

On the map, a striking red line stretches from the Mongolian grasslands, across the Great Wall, and into the depths of Northeast China.

"Family members, do you remember the Jianzhou Jurchen we mentioned when we talked about the Chenghua Dynasty? The tribe that was taken over by the Buryat wild boar skin!" Zhu Dijun slammed his fist on the whiteboard.

The top-secret record in the Imperial Jade Register states: "[In the eleventh month of winter, the Emperor heard that the Jurchens had infiltrated the Tatars, so he personally went to punish them, beheaded the ringleaders, and inspected Yongning Temple!]"

With that shout, the red dot on the large screen map instantly locked onto Yongning Temple, the seat of the Nurgan Regional Military Commission!

"Zhu Houzhao has found out! Those Jurchens hiding in the Northeast, in the white mountains and black waters, outwardly submit to the Ming Dynasty, but secretly they are spies for Dayan Khan, and even coordinating smuggling trade! After learning the truth, the Ming Emperor didn't waste any words, and personally led his victorious army, braving the blizzard, to march into the Northeast!"

Zhu Dijun made a fierce chopping gesture, his face contorted in a ferocious expression.

"With the army pressing in, Zhu Houzhao immediately ordered at Yongning Temple to drag out the Jurchen chieftain who had colluded with the Tatars and chop off his head! This is what is meant by 'Those who offend the Ming Dynasty, though far away, shall be punished without mercy!'"

Upon hearing this history, the entire live stream room erupted in excitement.

In the Xianyang Palace of the Qin Dynasty, Qin Shi Huang Ying Zheng nodded slightly, a cold smile of extreme admiration appearing on his lips.

"Such swift and skillful swordsmanship. Upon discovering the barbarians' rebellion, he ignored the scholars' arguments and directly dispatched troops to behead them. This young man has truly grasped the essence of imperial ruthlessness."

The calendar on the big screen flipped through its pages one last time.

[December of the twelfth year of Zhengde's reign].

"By December, two pieces of news arrived from the entire northern front of the Ming Dynasty, confirming the fate of the nation!"

Zhu Dijun placed his hands on the table, like a judge announcing a death sentence.

"First, the Mongol prince Dayan Khan, who was severely wounded and retreated to the desert, didn't survive the harsh winter. His old wounds flared up, and he died!"

"Secondly, with Dayan Khan's death, his son was utterly terrified by the terrifying power of the Ming Dynasty's firearms. To save his life, the new Mongol Khan immediately dispatched envoys to submit a surrender document to the Ming court, bowing his head in submission and continuing to obediently serve as the Ming Dynasty's watchdog!"

The war drums fell completely silent at that moment. On the large screen in the live stream, images slowly appeared...

The tattered yet unyielding battle flag bearing the name of "General Zhu Shou, the Mighty Warrior".

"Family members, let's now summarize this great victory at Yingzhou, which has been erased six hundred years ago." Zhu Dijun's speech became extremely calm, yet every word carried immense weight. "The Ming Dynasty used high-tech firearms in a concentrated attack, killing and wounding countless elite Tatars. We annihilated the Jurchen traitors, outlived the Mongol Khan, and reclaimed the northern grasslands!"

"What does this mean? This is the greatest and most thorough overwhelming military victory that the Ming Empire has achieved on its northern border since Emperor Yongle (Zhu Di)!"

The screen suddenly darkened, and two eerie black wisps of mist slowly rose from either side of the screen.

In the black mist on the left, the phantom images of the official robes of the Jiangnan civil officials emerged; in the black mist on the right, the pattern of the Manchu queue, a symbol of the Qing dynasty's forced hair-shaving and clothing-changing policy, appeared.

"But behind this extraordinary feat lay the most sensitive and fatal bottom line for both sides!"

Zhu Dijun sneered repeatedly, his voice sounding like it came from the underworld.

"The civil officials in Jiangnan are terrified! They are terrified! Looking at Zhu Houzhao with his victorious army of 150,000, they seem to see the Yongle Emperor, who trampled Nanjing and stripped all the civil officials of their power, resurrected! Once Zhu Houzhao returns to court in triumph, their century-old scheme of civil officials stripping military generals of their power will be completely shattered!"

"On the other hand, the Buryat wild boar skins of the Manqing were filled with extreme hatred! After entering the pass, they not only had old grudges—Zhu Houzhao had beheaded their ancestors; but also new hatreds—they absolutely could not allow such a ruthless emperor with such martial virtue to exist in Han history, as that would severely shake the legal foundation of their enslavement and rule over the Han people!"

Zhu Dijun slammed his hand on the whiteboard, and the two streams of black mist merged completely in the center of the screen, transforming into a hideous, dripping blood net.

"Therefore, these two interest groups hit it off immediately! During the mid-to-late Ming Dynasty and the Qing Dynasty, they mobilized the entire nation's pen and exerted their influence relentlessly. Just like with Emperor Xianzong of Ming, Zhu Jianshen, they smeared Zhu Houzhao with countless fabricated and disgusting crimes. They completely smeared this great victory at Yingzhou, a place where all nations came to pay tribute, into an absurd farce with only 'sixteen dead and wounded'!"

The entire internet was gripped by extreme oppression and anger. The truth of history, once laid bare, revealed a skeleton so ugly and cruel.

In the twelfth year of the Zhengde reign of the Ming Dynasty, in Xuanfu Zhenguo Prefecture.

Zhu Houzhao stood before the main tent, gazing at the sky, his lips curling into an intense chill. His hand gripped the hilt of the Emperor's Sword tightly. He knew he had won the battle, but the war against those pedantic and corrupt officials had only just begun.

"Since that's the case..."

On the screen, Zhu Dijun suddenly suppressed all his anger, and the large screen fell into complete, deathly darkness.

Just when everyone thought the live stream was about to end, a dull, heavy "plop" sound, like a heavy object falling into water, suddenly rang out in the darkness!

The hearts of viewers across the internet skipped a beat.

"Since we can't defeat this mighty general in open warfare..."

In the darkness, Judy Jun's ghostly voice slowly drifted out.

"Then, in the autumn of the fifteenth year of Zhengde, three years later..."

"On the banks of the Qingjiang River in the south of the Ming Dynasty, there lies the unsolved mystery of how the young Emperor Wuzong inexplicably fell into the water and subsequently died under mysterious circumstances..."

A blood-dripping dragon throne loomed in the darkness.

"Who was it that personally delivered the fatal blow from behind the emperor's back in the civil service's twelve-year-long, meticulously planned and executed scheme?"