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

On the big screen in the live stream room,

"The day after tomorrow, the Ming Dynasty's number one reclusive emperor will teach you a lesson!"

The line of blood-red text remained on the public screen for three seconds before being completely cut off.

Zhu Dijun let out a long sigh of frustration and glanced at the top left corner, where the broadcast duration had jumped to four hours.

Although the comments were still flooding the screen with messages like "Don't go" and "Keep talking about Jiajing," he didn't hesitate to press the end button.

"Family members, broadcasting for four hours straight is exhausting, even for the most resilient voice. That's all for today's exposé of the Zhengde reign's bloodshed. See you the day after tomorrow at the same time, to see how this great Ming Dynasty Taoist priest, Jiajing, mercilessly crushes Yang Tinghe and his gang of old foxes!"

The streaming signal was cut off, and the bright lights in the live broadcast room went out instantly.

Zhu Dijun pushed open the soundproof door, and the motion-sensor lights in the corridor turned on.

Li Jiujiang was already waiting outside the door, holding a bottle of mineral water with the cap unscrewed, his face extremely grim.

At this moment, although the sky over the Ming Dynasty in the myriad worlds had darkened, strangely enough, the image of Zhu Dijun pushing open the door continued to appear faintly in the minds of emperors of various dynasties and in mid-air, in the form of a voice-over and a hidden Easter egg.

Li Jiujiang handed the water to Zhu Dijun, took off the monitoring headphones he had been wearing all night, and sighed heavily.

"Alas, I never imagined that Emperor Zhengde, Zhu Houzhao, would die such a tragic death. Not only was he poisoned to death by the imperial physicians, but he also killed his loyal adopted son Jiang Bin and others. He couldn't even protect his wife and nameless offspring, who were completely wiped out by the civil officials."

Zhu Dijun took the water and gulped down half the bottle, a terrifying glint flashing in his eyes.

"Yes. That's why an emperor must never be soft-hearted."

He leaned against the white wall of the corridor, his voice slightly hoarse from the long live broadcast, but to the Ming emperors who were eavesdropping, every word was like thunder.

"Especially the emperors of the Ming Dynasty, facing a group of civil officials who had experienced a century of the Song and Yuan dynasties under Zhao Er's ideology of 'all professions are inferior, only studying is superior, and the law does not apply to high officials,' had been completely blinded by self-interest and were willing to sell out even the public good for personal gain."

Judy Jun sneered.

"Trying to reason with them about morality and ethics? That's suicide! The most effective way to deal with these parasites is to directly use the extinction strategy employed by the later Qing Dynasty!"

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

Zhu Yuanzhang, who was still immersed in grief and indignation, suddenly pricked up his ears.

Could the barbarians' methods be any more ruthless than the skinning and stuffing of the Zhu family?

In reality, Li Jiujiang was also taken aback, and blurted out:

"Dijun, I've also learned a bit about the Ming Dynasty. Those Ming Dynasty civil officials were so difficult to deal with; what methods could we learn from the Manchus to completely subdue them?"

Zhu Dijun crushed the plastic water bottle in his hand, making an extremely grating scraping sound.

"First and foremost, the core issue is damn military power! Pure violence!"

Zhu Dijun's eyes were terrifyingly cold.

"Why were the Ming emperors constantly bullied? Because they lacked a completely independent, loyal military force that served only the emperor! What did the Qing Dynasty have? The Eight Banners!"

"This massive Eight Banners army was the absolute foundation of the Manchu rule. Faced with disobedient Han officials, the Manchu emperors didn't need to engage in any political games of quoting classical texts in the court. If you disobeyed? They would simply send the Eight Banners troops to surround your residence! Confiscate your property! Exile you! Execute your entire clan! They used the purest physical destruction to crush all the empty rhetoric of the civil officials!"

Under the sky, Emperor Wuzong Zhu Houzhao, who was leading his troops stationed outside the capital, suddenly had a bright look in his eyes.

Exactly! What's the point of talking to civil officials about the Great Ming Code?

He currently commands over 100,000 elite border troops. As long as he firmly grasps military power, anyone who dares to utter a word will be trampled to the ground!

"And locally!"

Zhu Dijun said coldly,

"The Qing dynasty long controlled all the strategic passes, military power, and high-ranking positions of financial governors. Han officials in local areas were merely laborers, making it impossible for them to form the kind of political separatist alliances formed by the Jiangnan literati during the Ming dynasty!"

Li Jiujiang was speechless with astonishment:

"And what about the central government? Isn't the Grand Secretary still a Han Chinese?"

"The Grand Secretary?"

Judy Jun let out a mocking laugh.

"On the surface, the Qing Dynasty claimed to 'inherit the Ming system,' but in reality, it had already reorganized power in a way that its own mother wouldn't recognize it! The Manchu emperors completely abolished the role of the prime minister, rendering the cabinet utterly ineffective!"

Zhu Dijun held up two fingers.

"Although the Ming Dynasty's cabinet did not have the title of prime minister, it had the real power to draft imperial edicts and could use the rules to reject the emperor's decrees! By the Qing Dynasty, the cabinet had no decision-making power whatsoever and was completely reduced to a mere messenger office for conveying imperial edicts and issuing proclamations!"

"The real core was the Grand Council, which was established by Emperor Yongzheng!"

These three words struck the hearts of all the Ming emperors like a heavy hammer.

"The Grand Council is the absolute pinnacle of imperial autocracy! The entire core decision-making circle is compressed to just the emperor and a few Manchu and Mongol nobles; very few Han Chinese can enter!"

"Those so-called Grand Councilors, their job is called 'kneeling to record memorials'! What does that mean? You don't even have the right to speak standing up! Kneeling on the ground, you're just a heartless typist! You write down whatever the emperor says! You have no right to participate in discussions! You have no right to object! If the entire civil service of the Ming Dynasty were in the Qing Dynasty, they wouldn't even be able to touch the core of the government, let alone talk about usurping imperial power!"

When Zhu Yuanzhang, the Hongwu Emperor, heard the words "kneeling to record the text," he immediately slapped the teacup next to him and smashed it.

What a blatant act of kneeling and submitting a written statement! What a masterful way of merely recording without any discussion!

Zhu Dijun's voice continued.

"In terms of bureaucratic structure, the Qing Dynasty implemented a dual-track system of Manchu and Han officials, meaning that Manchus controlled the Han officials. The six ministries and various government offices in the central government each had one Manchu minister and one Han minister. Sounds fair, right?"

Zhu Dijun's face was full of disdain.

"In reality, the real power of the seal and decision-making was entirely in the hands of the Manchus! The Han people were just scapegoats! They used the contradictions between the Manchus and the Han, and between the North and the South, to make their subordinates tear each other apart every day, and strictly prevented Han officials from forming factions! They even changed their surnames to Han, mixed in with the Han people to sow discord and prevent the Han people from uniting."

Li Jiujiang swallowed hard.

"That's a pretty underhanded tactic. What about the oversight system? Weren't the censors of the Ming Dynasty known for daring to criticize even the emperor?"

"In the Ming Dynasty, officials were able to 'report on hearsay' and use it to criticize the emperor in order to gain a good reputation."

Judy Jun snorted coldly.

"The Qing dynasty directly cut off their supply lines! If an impeachment fails, sorry, they're dismissed and kicked out! You want fame? You'll pay with your life! Either you'll be exiled to Ningguta, or you'll be made into a dish of sliced ​​beef and tripe in chili sauce or clay pot rice!"

"Not only that, Yongzheng also created the extremely terrifying systems of 'secret memorials' and 'integrity allowances'!"

"Secret reports grant local officials of all ranks the privilege of directly reporting to the emperor, bypassing their superiors! This creates an atmosphere of fear throughout the officialdom, with subordinates spying on their superiors and colleagues denouncing each other! It completely destroys any semblance of trust within the civil service system! And the 'integrity allowance' is a huge sum of money far exceeding your normal salary. Once you take the emperor's money, your economic lifeline is completely tied to imperial power. How can you possibly have the guts to resist?!"

Under the sky, Emperor Chongzhen, Zhu Youjian, trembled as he listened.

He was so poor at the Coal Hill that he couldn't even scrape together a few hundred thousand taels for military pay, and all the civil officials were crying poverty. If they were to secretly implicate each other and then use high salaries to keep them in check, how would these Donglin Party members dare to oppose him every day?!

"However, the most terrifying effect was the Manchu Qing dynasty's 'ideological indoctrination' of Han Chinese civil officials."

Zhu Dijun stopped in his tracks, his eyes like those of a judge from the underworld.

"The Manchu emperors cruelly distinguished between the titles 'slave' and 'subject'! Emperor Yongzheng established a strict rule: Manchu officials must refer to themselves as 'slave,' signifying they were one of their own, representing closeness. But Han officials? Even if you reached the highest rank, you were only entitled to call yourself 'subject'! This meant you were an outsider, an employee who could be guarded against at any time!"

"The essence of this title is to kick Han Chinese civil officials out of the Confucian ideal of 'joint governance of the world by the emperor and his ministers,' and degrade them into lowly objects who don't even recognize their masters!"

"And then there was the literary inquisition that lasted for over a century! For example, the saying 'Qingfeng is illiterate' was used to condemn entire families, even exhuming corpses and mutilating them! It shattered the backbone of Han scholars inch by inch! Finally, under the guise of compiling the *Siku Quanshu* (Complete Library of the Four Treasuries), all ancient books with national consciousness and critical spirit were destroyed or altered. These scholars were essentially castrated into walking corpses who only dared to bury themselves in textual research and dared not even discuss half of the country's affairs!"

Li Jiujiang was completely dumbfounded and stammered, "..."

"What about the eunuchs? Didn't the Ming Dynasty emperors rely on eunuchs to check and balance the civil officials?"

"The Qing Dynasty didn't need eunuchs to check and balance things!" Zhu Dijun scoffed.

"They established the Imperial Household Department, using Manchu bondservantes—their own household slaves—to manage all affairs of the imperial family. The power of eunuchs was completely stripped away, and they were strictly forbidden from interfering in politics! The civil service became an isolated island, unable to find any external force to unite against imperial power!"

In the vast universe of the Ming Dynasty, all the heavens fell into utter silence at this moment.

Zhu Yuanzhang, Zhu Di, Zhu Houzhao, Zhu Youjian...

These emperors, who were tormented by civil officials in different times and places, and even suffered the loss of their countries and the extinction of their races, all had extremely terrifying black flames burning in their eyes.

Were the methods of the Manchu Qing dynasty dirty? Absolutely dirty!

But is it useful? It's so incredibly useful that it can trample the civil service underfoot and treat them like dogs!

Zhu Houzhao wiped the blood off his face on horseback, looked at the distant city of Beijing, and a cruel, sinister smile appeared on his lips.

Since you civil officials don't treat me like a human being, then don't blame me for killing you like slaves!

At that moment, Zhu Dijun and Li Jiujiang had already stepped out of the building's elevator.

"These methods, though ruthless and capable of turning bureaucrats into complete lackeys, are ultimately poison that destroys national spirit and ideology."

Judy looked up at the night sky outside.

"However, compared to the Ming Dynasty's Jiajing Daoist priest who was about to enter the capital, the Manchus were all simply and brutally reckless."

Li Jiujiang was taken aback:

"How so?"

Zhu Dijun smirked, his voice sounding extremely eerie in the night wind.

"Because the fifteen-year-old Jiajing Emperor did not need the Eight Banners, the Grand Council, or any literary inquisition. He relied solely on himself and his brain, and on his very first day in Beijing, he forced the powerful and arrogant Grand Secretary Yang Tinghe into a dead end where he was worse than dead."

"What kind of desperate situation is it?" Li Jiujiang suddenly asked.

Zhu Dijun opened the car door and uttered a sentence that made every civil official in the Ming Dynasty instantly shudder.

"That desperate situation is called—either kneel down and become my son, or…your entire family will be wiped out!"