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

The large screen lit up again, and the blinding white of the CD player dispelled the darkness.

Zhu Dijun stood in front of the live broadcast table, his hands supporting the podium, and a copy of a Ming Dynasty secret document appeared on the screen, covered with green highlighted marks.

"Family members, let's continue! Let's see how this grandmaster of Neo-Confucianism gradually pushes his brother-in-law, his closest friend, into an abyss of no return!"

Zhu Dijun grabbed the laser pointer, and the red light circled wildly around a line of green classical Chinese characters.

"After Wang Yangming discovered that Prince Ning was a spy sent by Zhu Houzhao, and that Prince Ning possessed the smuggling ledger that could have killed all the civil officials in Jiangnan, the first thing he did was not to go to the banquet in Nanchang, but to send his student, the Ming Dynasty scholar Ji Yuanheng, to Nanchang to secretly contact Prince Ning!"

"What did these two discuss in the secret room? The original words in the historical records are—'Those who know people cannot understand their reasons'! Outsiders have no idea what they talked about!"

Zhu Dijun sneered and slapped the whiteboard.

"But the series of events that followed completely ripped this fig leaf off!"

The timeline jumps across the screen, freezing on an extremely lively day.

"It's Prince Ning, Zhu Chenhao's, birthday!"

Zhu Dijun's voice was extremely sinister.

"At this very moment, Wang Yangming, under the pretext of having official business, first sent someone to deliver lavish gifts to Zhu Chenhao as a birthday greeting. Immediately afterwards, under the guise of offering congratulations, he secretly invited Liu Yangzheng, the Prince of Ning's core strategist and his former close friend, to a multi-storied ship on the Ji'an River!"

"The two of them talked in private on this ship until the very end of the night!"

An animated demonstration of a nighttime conversation on a ship appeared on the big screen.

After the talks, Liu Yangzheng disembarked and rushed back to Nanchang overnight. Wang Yangming, on the other hand, remained safely on his ship!

"The next day! That is, the fourteenth day of the sixth month of the fourteenth year of the Zhengde reign of the Ming Dynasty!"

Three blood-red bomb effects exploded on the screen!

"Prince Zhu Chenhao of Ning has officially launched a rebellion in Nanchang!"

Zhu Dijun gripped the edge of the podium tightly with both hands, his eyes blazing with an extremely fanatical light.

"Family members! We just finished talking on the boat, and the Prince of Ning immediately overturned the table! Even a fool could see that Wang Yangming definitely confided in Liu Yangzheng on the boat, telling Liu Yangzheng to go back and tell the Prince of Ning: 'The time to raise an army has come, rebel now! I, Wang Yangming, will be outside supporting you!'"

The entire online audience was completely stunned by this shocking logical reversal.

The scene then shifts to Nanpu, outside Nanchang city.

"After Liu Yangzheng returned from the ship, he received an extremely enthusiastic reception from Prince Ning. Prince Ning was eager to know what Wang Yangming had promised. After hearing Liu Yangzheng's report, Prince Ning was so excited that he immediately swore brotherhood with Liu Yangzheng as his military advisor!"

"On the afternoon of the day of the rebellion!"

Zhu Dijun shouted at the top of his lungs, his words dripping with sarcasm.

"Prince Zhu Chenhao of Ning stood on the city wall, gazing longingly into the distance. He hoped that his inside man, his senior brother Wang Yangming, would bring a large army to join him and together they would reshape the Jiangnan region!"

"And the result?!"

"He didn't receive the allied forces he was waiting for. What he received was a large army led by Wang Yangming, who came under the banner of 'suppressing the rebellion' to kill witnesses and seize account books!"

"Wang Yangming never intended to collude with them, much less to play along with the emperor! What he wanted was to use the corpses of these two fools to destroy the irrefutable evidence of the smuggling by the Jiangnan civil officials, and at the same time use their heads to obtain for himself a unique hereditary title in the Ming Dynasty!"

"Zhu Chenhao and Liu Yangzheng were betrayed by Wang Yangming, and they're still counting their money for him atop Nanchang city walls!"

In the modern live streaming room, the barrage of comments has completely gone crazy.

"Holy crap!! This cunning! This ruthlessness! Is this some kind of saint? Or some ancient demon?!"

["Ning Wang: I thought you were an ally, but you just came up and destroyed my fountain!"]

"Liu Yangzheng is truly cursed for eight lifetimes to have made such a ruthless friend, dragging his entire family down with him!"

"This is incredible! This is the true intellectual battle of the Ming Dynasty! Zhu Houzhao's script was intercepted halfway by Wang Yangming!"

Zhu Dijun coldly stared at the comments section, a sneer of extreme contempt curling at the corner of his mouth.

"Family members, you think that's all? Wang Dashengren's most disgusting act wasn't this backstabbing! It was the utterly despicable thing he did after Liu Yangzheng was captured and beheaded—a hypocrite who wanted to pretend to be virtuous while being a prostitute!"

On the big screen, a desolate, solitary grave appeared.

"Liu Yangzheng was executed because he was a traitor, and his elderly mother also suffered as a result. After her death, her coffin was left exposed to the elements, and no one in the entire Jiangxi province dared to collect her body for burial."

"At this moment, our great sage Wang stepped forward! He ordered a grand funeral for Liu Yangzheng's mother and personally wrote an extremely affectionate and sorrowful eulogy to commemorate his past 'spiritual friendship' with Liu Yangzheng!"

Zhu Dijun took out a yellowed document and slammed it heavily onto the center of the screen.

"Come on! Let's see how this superb obituary is written! A masterpiece for all to enjoy!"

"Alas! Liu Shengzi Ji, his mother died without being buried. This led to war; a single wrong decision brought this to this. How tragic!"

"Now I bury my son's mother, hoping to comfort his soul. For though the duty between ruler and subject cannot be shown to one's son personally, the affection between friends can still be shown to one's son's mother. Alas, how sorrowful!"

"For those family members who didn't understand, let me translate the shamelessness between the lines!"

Zhu Dijun suddenly waved his hand, and the vernacular translation lit up line by line next to him.

"【Alas! Liu Shengzi Ji, your mother is dead and no one even buries her. It's all because of this war; you made a rash decision to rebel, and now you've ended up like this. How tragic!】"

"Today I've come to help you bury your elderly mother, to comfort her spirit in heaven. In terms of loyalty between ruler and subject, I cannot protect you, a traitor; but considering our past friendship, I can still do my part for your mother. How tragic!"

"I'm so sorry, you old man!"

Zhu Dijun immediately cursed and slammed his fist hard on the table.

"You're the one who tricked everyone into rebelling! You used your relationship to push them into a deadly trap on the ship! Then you took their heads, got promoted and made a fortune, and now you come here to mourn their mothers, shamelessly spouting nonsense about 'loyalty between ruler and subject' and 'friendship'! What is this? This is called selling someone out and then shitting on their grave!"

"At the time, all the Confucian scholars in Ji'an, Jiangxi, couldn't bear to read this eulogy!"

Zhu Dijun directly presented the true record from Volume 176 of the "Veritable Records of Emperor Wuzong of Ming".

"A Confucian scholar from Jiangxi wrote a letter directly criticizing Wang Yangming! The original text records: 'A Confucian scholar submitted a letter arguing that there is no fundamental difference between ruler and subject and friend, which made Shouren (Wang Yangming) feel ashamed!'"

"Did you hear that?! That Confucian scholar pointed his finger at him and berated him: 'The principles of ruler and subject and the principles of friendship are essentially the same! You're mentally unstable! You're a traitor!'"

"Faced with such a hard-hitting rebuttal, how did this eloquent grandmaster of Neo-Confucianism react? 【Feeling ashamed】! Those four words left him speechless, unable to utter a single word!"

Across countless worlds and timelines, all the scholars of the Ming Dynasty fell into a deathly silence at this moment.

Once the mask of hypocrisy worn by Wang Shouren, the master of Neo-Confucianism, was torn off, the face revealed was so ugly as to be nauseating.

However, the sanctions imposed from above continue to escalate.

"Do you think Wang Yangming only knew how to play dead? No, it was to ensure that his conspiracy with Liu Yangzheng on the ship would never be known to Zhu Houzhao, and to ensure that the smuggling ledger that was burned would remain a mystery forever."

Four large, blood-stained characters crashed down—【Dead men tell no tales】!

"Do you remember Ji Yuanheng, the student who went to Nanchang to contact Prince Ning in place of Wang Yangming? He was the errand boy who knew the most crucial secrets of the entire plan."

"After the rebellion of Prince Ning was quelled, Ji Yuanheng was directly arrested and imprisoned by Zhang Yong, the eunuch sent to investigate the case! Not long after, this strong and capable scholar died mysteriously in the heavily guarded prison!"

Zhu Dijun stared at the camera, his eyes filled with the cold light of death.

"Family members, in the arena of power, any death is never without reason! This is a complete, closed-loop murder to cover it up!"

"Anyone who knew the core secrets of Wang Yangming's involvement in instigating the Prince of Ning's rebellion was silenced! If it weren't for the scraps of records in these local gazetteers, and the records of the Ji'an Confucian scholars' defiant actions preserved in the Veritable Records of Emperor Wuzong of Ming!"

"Just like those of the past few centuries, all of us today will be so misled by this 'perfect man for all time' and 'grandmaster of the philosophy of mind' that later generations have touted him as that that we'll lose our bearings!"

Rumble!

The wrath of thunder resounded wildly across different eras and times of the Ming Dynasty.

In a parallel universe, in the 14th year of the Zhengde reign of the Ming Dynasty, in early June.

The secret chamber of Prince Ning in Nanchang Prefecture.

Prince Ning Zhu Chenhao, who had not yet raised an army, Right Chancellor Liu Yangzheng, and Ji Yuanheng, who was spreading false information, were all in the same room at this time.

Looking at the irrefutable evidence exposed on the sky, and seeing his future being manipulated by Wang Yangming like a fool, ultimately resulting in his head being separated from his body, his elderly mother being exposed in the wilderness, and his students dying in prison.

The three of them were breathing incoherently.

"Excellent! What a noble example of loyalty between ruler and subject, putting personal interests above all else! What a fine example of Wang Shouren!"

Liu Yangzheng's eyes were bloodshot. He slammed his hand on the table, and his palm was pierced by a splinter, causing blood to flow freely.

He raised his head and let out a fierce roar like a wild beast on its deathbed, his teeth grinding together.

"I, Liu Ziji, considered you my lifelong confidant! I thought all the scholars in Jiangnan shared our hatred! Turns out... they all used you and me as human shields to cover up their corruption and smuggling!"

Ji Yuanheng, standing next to him, was trembling all over, cold sweat dripping down his forehead.

He was just a gofer, and yet he ended up dying suddenly in prison? Is this the fate his revered teacher had arranged for him?

"Wang Shouren..."

Prince Ning, Zhu Chenhao, slowly drew the sword from his waist, his eyes gleaming with an extremely crazed, bloodthirsty light.

"You want my life in exchange for your crimson python robe... You want to trample on my life and fortune to clean up the messes of those corrupt officials in Jiangnan!"

Prince Ning suddenly cleaved the wooden carved screen in half with his sword.

"You're dreaming!"

"Since you don't want me to live, then let's all go to hell!"

Zhu Chenhao turned to look at Liu Yangzheng and roared fiercely.

"Immediately seal all account books! Make ten copies! Hide them in famous mountains and ancient temples throughout the land! Then send assassins north overnight!"

"Even if I die, I will die in the imperial prison of the Forbidden City, in front of Emperor Zhengde! I will drag all these damned Jiangnan civil officials, including Wang Shouren, into a vat of boiling oil in front of the whole world!"

However, after this extreme rage...

Inside the modern live broadcast studio, the large screen's image completely shifted to a misty, watery scene of the Jiangnan river.

Zhu Dijun suppressed all his anger, and his voice became extremely deep, like an undercurrent at the bottom of a river.

"Family members, the tragedy of history is that the account book was ultimately not preserved."

"When Zhu Houzhao, full of joy, arrived in Jiangnan with his army, ready to receive this irrefutable evidence that could have crushed the civil official group, all he saw was a list of useless scapegoats."

The sound effects of flowing water slowly rose from the bottom of the live stream room.

"Furthermore, let's set aside the stigmatized southward journey of Emperor Wuzong Zhu Houzhao for now. Let's move the timeline forward and talk about Zeng Guofan of the Xiang Army, who drastically altered Wang Yangming's philosophy of mind. Their paths to 'sagehood' were exactly the same. Moreover, this Zeng Guofan was a Han Chinese who was a descendant of Emperor Yongzheng's sons. He is not the false history we see today through so-called encyclopedias, Baidu, or Douban."