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

"In the spring of March of the sixteenth year of the Zhengde reign, the temperature in Beijing was clearly beginning to warm up. But inside the Leopard House outside the Xihua Gate of the Forbidden City, there was an extreme chill that would freeze even the dead to the bone!"

On the large screen in the live broadcast room, a photocopy of a prescription file from the Imperial Medical Academy of the Ming Dynasty was suddenly displayed. Zhu Dijun grabbed the gavel from the podium and slammed it down!

"Family members! I just asked you all, what exactly was added to the medicine Zhu Houzhao drank before he died? Many people guessed in the comments that it was arsenic or poison. Wrong!"

Zhu Dijun suddenly raised a finger, his eyes as cold as a knife.

"If Yang Tinghe and his group of civil officials dared to directly administer deadly poison, causing the Ming emperor to bleed from all seven orifices and die on the spot, even if the sky were to fall, the hundreds of thousands of border troops in the north would directly raze Beijing to the ground to avenge the emperor!"

"They used an extremely sophisticated and insidious method of legal murder—medical control!"

Four large, blood-red characters exploded on the public screen. Zhu Dijun ripped off his tie, pointed at the file on the screen, and roared angrily.

"The Imperial Medical Academy of the Ming Dynasty! What kind of place is this, dedicated to healing and saving lives? In the late Zhengde period, when imperial power and the power of the prime minister were locked in a fierce struggle, these imperial physicians had long since become the government's executioners, manipulated by the civil official group!"

"Let's see how the 'Veritable Records of Emperor Wuzong of Ming' records Zhu Houzhao's final moments!"

Zhu Dijun circled a passage of text in red pen.

"After Zhu Houzhao fell into the water, he barely managed to return to the capital. In the first month of the sixteenth year of Zhengde's reign, he presided over an extremely complicated and physically demanding grand ceremony for Heaven and Earth in the southern suburbs! Could a dying man complete a whole day's sacrificial ceremony in the dead of winter? This shows that his physical condition was still intact, and as long as he rested, he could definitely pull through!"

"But at the very last moment of the grand ceremony, Zhu Houzhao suddenly vomited blood and collapsed."

Judy Jun approached the camera, his eyes twitching wildly with extreme anger.

"The moment the emperor collapsed, Grand Secretary Yang Tinghe immediately took control of all medical affairs at the Leopard Chamber!"

An excerpt from "Chronological Biography of Yang Tinghe" was slammed onto the whiteboard.

"Yang Tinghe bypassed the emperor's personal attendants and personally appointed the chief physician of the Imperial Medical Academy to prescribe medicine for Emperor Wuzong! What medicine was prescribed?"

Judy Jun let out an extremely chilling laugh, "They're all potent tonics! Deadly poisons!"

"Any family member with even a basic understanding of Traditional Chinese Medicine knows that Zhu Houzhao suffered severe internal injuries from being ambushed in the pool, or that he caught a cold after falling into the water, leading to a lung infection! In Traditional Chinese Medicine theory, this is called 'external pathogens entering the body, causing the body to be too weak to tolerate tonics!'"

Zhu Dijun slammed his foot on the live-streaming platform, the deafening roar echoing through all parallel universes. "Faced with a patient with a lung infection and old internal injuries, you don't treat the inflammation, the asthma, or the blood stasis. You're just giving him ginseng and deer antler—extremely potent 'heat-inducing' substances—every day!"

"Is this treatment?! This is blatant poisoning! This is legal medical murder!"

The setting is the sixteenth year of the Zhengde reign of the Ming Dynasty.

Inside the secret chamber of the Leopard House.

Zhu Houzhao, seriously ill and bedridden, stared intently at the sky, his withered hands frantically scratching at the bright yellow dragon bed sheets, his fingernails splitting open and bleeding profusely.

The eunuchs and imperial physicians carrying the medicine were so frightened that they wet themselves and collapsed to the ground, desperately kowtowing and begging for mercy on the blue bricks.

"I see... Yang Tinghe!"

Zhu Houzhao let out a mournful roar like a wild beast on its deathbed, his eyes wide open as if they were about to burst out of their sockets.

With each sip of medicine he took, he felt as if countless fires were burning in his chest. It turned out that these imperial physicians who claimed to be thinking of the emperor's health were actually the Black and White Impermanence sent by Yang Tinghe to hasten his death!

In the modern live broadcast room, Zhu Dijun's denunciation has escalated to an extremely fierce level.

"The emperor is being forced to vomit blood day and night by these imperial physicians! Is he a fool on his sickbed? Can't he realize there's something wrong with the medicine?!"

The image on the big screen suddenly changed.

"Zhu Houzhao certainly knew these civil officials wanted to kill him! That's why the History of Ming records a sentence he uttered before his death, a sentence filled with extreme despair but also extreme courage!"

Zhu Dijun pointed to a line of ancient text on the screen, his eyes reflecting a cold, eerie light.

"Summon Sima immediately; all others retreat!"

"Translated, it means: Summon Wang Qiong, the Minister of War, to me immediately! Everyone else, get out!"

Zhu Dijun pressed his hands firmly on the table, his voice hoarse from extreme suppression.

"Even on his deathbed, Zhu Houzhao never trusted Yang Tinghe! He believed until his death that Wang Qiong, the Minister of War who was being vehemently impeached by the civil official group, was still the most loyal core of his Ming Dynasty's imperial faction! He wanted to see Wang Qiong so that he could issue a final secret edict to bring in Jiang Bin and the border troops, and kill all those civil officials who wanted him dead!"

"But Zhu Houzhao never knew this until his death." A chilling, extremely sarcastic glint flashed across Zhu Dijun's eyes.

"Wang Qiong, on whom he placed high hopes, had already made an extremely dirty political deal with Yang Tinghe because of that two million taels of illicit funds!"

"Wang Qiong was right outside the palace! But he didn't go in at all! He heard the emperor's stern summons from inside, but he kept his mouth shut and pretended to be deaf!"

Across countless worlds and timelines, numerous emperors witnessed this scene, all feeling an overwhelming sense of isolation and helplessness. Emperor Wu of Han, Liu Che, clenched his fists, his knuckles cracking. The emperors of the Ming Dynasty, the Zhu family, were even more enraged.

Under the sky, Zhu Dijun mercilessly tore open the final, bloody net.

"Jiang Bin, a trusted confidant outside, was firmly blocked from entering the palace by an imperial edict issued by Empress Dowager Zhang and Yang Tinghe. Wang Qiong, a core member of the Emperor's faction inside, defected at the last minute. Beside him, holding a bowl of medicine, were a bribed eunuch and the murderous imperial physician."

The sound of dripping water slowly rose from the bottom sound effects in the live broadcast room.

"Family members, put yourselves in his shoes. A thirty-one-year-old emperor, in the prime of his life. He lies all alone in the dimly lit Leopard Chamber, looking at the expressionless faces before him, and at the bowls of dark, murky medicine."

"They cried out to heaven and earth in vain. The highest level of imperial power in the Ming Dynasty was suffocated alive in bed by the airtight web of interests woven by the civil service!"

The large screen suddenly went black. Only a single, glaring white character remained—【崩】 (Collapse).

On the 14th day of the third month of the 16th year of Zhengde's reign, Emperor Wuzong Zhu Houzhao passed away.

Zhu Dijun picked up the pointer and slammed it onto the whiteboard. The screen suddenly lit up, and Yang Tinghe's righteous old face filled the entire screen.

"The moment the Emperor breathed his last, the civil service's celebration began!"

"What did Yang Tinghe produce? A document claiming to be Emperor Wuzong's dictated will before his death!"

Zhu Dijun burst into loud laughter, his laughter filled with utterly absurd sarcasm.

"In this so-called imperial edict, Emperor Wuzong, who had fought tooth and nail with the civil officials of Jiangnan during his lifetime and vowed to confiscate their property and exterminate their clans, suddenly had an epiphany! Suddenly became a sage!"

He went through the records one by one.

"The will stated: Abolish all garrison eunuchs! Dismiss all border generals! Return all assets confiscated in Jiangnan for smuggling to their original owners! Release all officials imprisoned for disobeying the emperor!"

"What's even more outrageous is that this edict not only overturned all the reforms of Emperor Wuzong's reign, but also forcibly added a sentence at the end: 'What I did before was all absurd; you must assist the new emperor well!'"

"These are Zhu Houzhao's words?!"

Zhu Dijun kicked over the trash can next to the podium.

"If this is Zhu Houzhao's intention, I, Zhu Dijun, will write my name backwards! This was completely written by Yang Tinghe, who packaged all the political demands, smuggling profits, and power that the civil service group had wanted over the past ten years into the mouth of a dead man!"

"By using the voices of the dead, they accomplished the ultimate usurpation of the Ming Dynasty's imperial power without shedding a drop of blood!"

The live stream chat was already filled with insults. The netizens' anger, after witnessing the official's shameless attempt to whitewash the situation, completely extinguished their reason.

"Having obtained all the power, they threw the obedient and loyal dog Jiang Bin into a death row cell and subjected him to slow slicing. Yang Tinghe clapped his hands with great satisfaction, seeing that the overall situation was settled."

Zhu Dijun turned around and drew the outline of a young man on a brand new blackboard.

"Since the throne is vacant, a new emperor must be chosen. At this time, Yang Tinghe, Mao Cheng, and other high-ranking civil officials were preoccupied with how to find an obedient puppet to consolidate the power they had stolen."

"Therefore, their gaze swept past all the close relatives of the royal family and was fixed on the fifteen-year-old prince in Anlu, Hubei."

Zhu Dijun picked up a red pen and wrote three characters on the young man's outline that would make him famous throughout the history of the Ming Dynasty.

Zhu Houcong!

"Yang Tinghe, the Grand Secretary of the Ming Dynasty at the time, thought that the person they had chosen was a naive and innocent girl who had grown up in the deep palace, had never seen the world, and was easily manipulated by civil officials."

"Not only Yang Tinghe thought this way, but even Wang Qiong, the Minister of War who cooperated with them in carrying out the mission of silencing witnesses, and Wang Yangming, who was hiding in his hometown of Yuyao, Zhejiang, promoting his philosophy of mind—everyone thought this way!"

The image on the large screen suddenly changed. In front of a magnificent Anlu Prince's Mansion, a young man dressed as a prince's heir with a strange smile was looking up at the sky.

Standing under the live-streaming lights where light and shadow met, Zhu Dijun's eyes revealed a chilling fervor.

"These self-righteous Jiangnan civil officials, these scholar-officials who would stop at nothing for profit."

"They never dreamed of this."

Zhu Dijun's voice was extremely low, like a thunderclap at midnight.

"What they welcomed into Beijing with great joy was not some obedient clay or wooden sculpture at all."

In the early years of the Jiajing reign of the Ming Dynasty, Zhu Houcong, sitting on the dragon throne, heard these words and a sinister, extremely gleeful laugh curled at the corner of his mouth.

Inside the modern live-streaming studio, Zhu Dijun slammed his hand on the table.

"Did you think you'd found an easy-to-manipulate puppet son to inherit the throne?"

"wrong!"

"You guys have pulled a thousand-layer wall-climbing ancestor from hell who's even more ruthless, cunning, and intelligent than Zhu Houzhao!"

"Yang Tinghe thought himself invincible. But from the moment this fifteen-year-old Taoist emperor arrives at the gates of the Forbidden City, he will teach the entire Ming Dynasty civil official group what a true purge of power is!"