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

At 8 p.m., the spotlights in the live broadcast room turned on right on time.

Three large, blood-red characters appeared directly on the big screen: "The Great Rites Controversy"!

Zhu Dijun stood in front of the podium, slamming his hand on the table with a loud bang. "Family members! In the last chapter, we talked about how the fifteen-year-old Emperor Zhu Houcong, at Liangxiang Post Station, used only one sentence to forcibly enter the Forbidden City through the main south gate of the Ming Dynasty."

"But would Yang Tinghe and his cabinet bigwigs just admit defeat? Absolutely not!" Zhu Dijun grabbed a laser pointer, the red light fixed firmly on Yang Tinghe's name on the whiteboard. "The civil service group, having suffered a setback, immediately resorted to their most disgusting and unsolvable tactic in court—ethical blackmail!"

Two opposing camps of classical Chinese literature appeared on the large screen.

"These scholars have packaged this political infighting as an extremely hypocritical struggle over legitimacy! This is what they call the 'Great Rites Controversy'!" Zhu Dijun loosened his tie and laughed with extreme sarcasm. "Yang Tinghe, in league with Mao Cheng, the Minister of Rites, invoked the ironclad rule of Confucian patriarchal law—'One who succeeds another is one's son.' They forced Zhu Houcong to acknowledge the deceased Emperor Xiaozong of Ming as his biological father and to call his own biological father, Prince Xingxian, 'uncle'!"

"Do you understand the viciousness of this logic? Once Zhu Houcong bows his head, the legitimacy of his position as the Ming emperor will no longer be the Mandate of Heaven, but rather a gift bestowed by the Grand Secretariat and the Empress Dowager! His imperial power will be forever trampled underfoot by the Grand Secretariat!"

A portrait of a fifteen-year-old boy was enlarged separately.

"What was Jiajing's reaction at fifteen? To hell with succession! I'm here to inherit the Ming Dynasty, not to be your puppet! His stance was extremely firm—succession is not! My father is my father, and no one can make me change my mind!"

Parallel universe. Anlu, 16th year of the Zhengde reign of the Ming Dynasty.

Before setting off for the capital, Zhu Houcong looked at the sky in mid-air, his hands clenched into fists so tightly that his nails dug into his flesh.

"These old dogs, they want to kill my lineage? They want me to disown even my own parents? Dream on!"

Inside the live stream, Zhu Dijun's speech suddenly quickened, carrying a sense of urgency amidst chaos.

"In the first year of the Jiajing reign, this was the initial stage of the Great Rites Controversy. The new emperor had just ascended the throne, with no troops or generals at his disposal, and faced the solid wall of the entire Ming Dynasty bureaucracy. Yang Tinghe thought he was sure to win. Any official who dared to support the emperor recognizing his biological father was directly dismissed and demoted by the cabinet."

"But Yang Tinghe overlooked one thing. Everyone in the world is driven by profit, and the Ming Dynasty's officialdom will never lack opportunists!" Zhu Dijun wrote two names heavily on the whiteboard—[Zhang Cong] and [Gui E].

"While the entire court was watching the emperor make a fool of himself, these two marginal figures, who had just passed the imperial examination and had no foundation in the court, jumped out! They cited Emperor Wuzong's edict, confronted Yang Tinghe head-on, and clung to the insistence that 'the bond between father and son cannot be taken away'! This is what the 'Rites Controversy' is all about! In Jiajing's hands, he finally had his first sword that could cut down the civil service!"

"Thus, this fifteen-year-old Taoist emperor displayed an extremely terrifying political composure."

A flicker of fervor flashed in Zhu Dijun's eyes.

"He compromised for now. He agreed to call his biological father 'his biological parents,' retaining the word 'biological.' He's waiting. Waiting for these civil officials to show their weakness, waiting for himself to gain sufficient power!"

The timeline on the screen sped up wildly, then froze three years later.

[July of the third year of the Jiajing reign]!

"After three long years of forbearance, Jiajing could no longer tolerate it! He directly recalled Zhang Cong and Gui E, ordered the removal of the words 'biological father' from their names, and resolved to honor their biological father as his imperial father!"

Zhu Dijun gripped the podium tightly with both hands.

"This completely enraged the civil service! They were shocked to discover that this young emperor had not only failed to be tamed, but was on the verge of riding roughshod over them!"

"The climax of the Great Rites Controversy, and also the most absurd and surreal scene in the 276-year history of the Ming Dynasty, erupted in front of the Zuoshun Gate!"

The image on the big screen suddenly changed.

The Forbidden City was shrouded in gloom. Outside the Zuoshun Gate, a dense mass of officials in their dark robes stood.

"Family members, open your eyes and see what these so-called pillars of the Ming Dynasty are doing!" Zhu Dijun kicked away the stool next to him and roared as he pointed at the kneeling civil officials on the screen.

"Yang Tinghe's son, Yang Shen, the top scholar of the Ming Dynasty! Together with He Mengchun, he led a group of over two hundred and twenty high-ranking officials! What were they doing kneeling outside the Zuoshun Gate? Crying! Wailing and sobbing! They were frantically shaking the palace gate while crying! Some were even cursing loudly outside the gate while crying!"

"Is this supposed to be advice?!"

Zhu Dijun's voice was like a powder keg exploding: "This is political bullying! This is a coup! More than two hundred high-ranking officials from various countries, in order to prevent the emperor from acknowledging his biological father, actually resorted to this kind of shrewish, dramatic, and even threatening-to-hang-hang tactic, attempting to drive an emperor who is not yet twenty years old insane and force him to submit!"

Inside the Fengtian Hall during the Hongwu reign.

Zhu Yuanzhang slapped the bronze inkstone in front of him, shattering it and splashing ink everywhere.

"You bastards! You've rebelled! You've completely rebelled!"

Zhu Yuanzhang's eyes were bloodshot.

"These are the subjects of our Great Ming Dynasty? Relying on their numbers, they dare to stand before the Emperor's gates and force him to abdicate? Do they really think the Zhu family's sword is dull?!"

On the ceiling, Zhu Dijun's cold laughter echoed throughout the entire hall.

"Yang Shen and his group cried with great satisfaction. They thought that the law would not punish the masses, and that as long as all the civil and military officials knelt here, the state machinery of the Ming Dynasty would come to a standstill, and the emperor would have to come out and apologize to them like a grandson who had made a mistake."

"But they had no idea that the young emperor sitting in the Forbidden City possessed a more cold-blooded and extreme tyrannical gene than Emperor Wuzong Zhu Houzhao!"

A large, blood-red character slammed onto the public screen—【Attack】!

"Jiajing didn't send anyone out to reason with them. Reasoning? That's something only the weak do!"

Judy Jun roared at the top of her lungs.

"The best way to deal with these shameless civil servants is to completely tear apart their facade of civility!"

"The Embroidered Uniform Guard is mobilized! The Imperial Guard and the Secret Service are all out in force!"

"Jiajing Emperor issued an imperial edict that shattered the entire Ming Dynasty bureaucracy: the eight ringleaders were arrested on the spot! The remaining 134 officials below the fifth rank were all dragged out and flogged with water and fire rods, right outside Zuoshun Gate, in front of the entire world—they were flogged in court!"

As Zhu Dijun roared, the sound effects at the bottom of the live stream instantly turned into an extremely dull and ear-piercing sound of wooden sticks hitting flesh.

boom! boom! boom!

"Fellow family members, what does it mean for 134 people to be flogged at the same time? It means the blue bricks outside Zuoshun Gate were stained dark red! It means the mournful screams of the entire court drowned out the bells and drums inside the Forbidden City!"

As Zhu Dijun approached the camera, an extremely cruel light flashed in his eyes.

"You like to cry, don't you? You like to make a scene, don't you? Today I'll let you cry your fill!" Jiajing showed no mercy. After this beating, seventeen high-ranking officials were beaten to death on the spot, lying in pools of blood! The remaining eighty-six officials of the fourth rank and above were all suspended from their salaries and sent home to reflect on their actions!

"Seventeen lives! Limbs and torsos scattered all over the ground!" Zhu Dijun suddenly waved his hand, and the horrific scene on the big screen instantly turned into ashes.

"This beating at Zuoshun Gate didn't just break the legs of these officials; it broke the backbone that the Ming Dynasty's scholar-official class had been proud of for over a century!"

"Yang Tinghe's faction, advocating for the establishment of the imperial court, completely collapsed. The once arrogant Grand Secretary Yang Tinghe was ultimately dismissed from his post and reduced to commoner status, slinking back to his hometown in Sichuan in disgrace. Yang Shen, who spearheaded the coup, was permanently exiled to Yunnan and never to be given a position of importance again!"

"From this day forward, the political landscape of the Ming Dynasty was completely overturned." Zhu Dijun stood in front of the whiteboard and wrote four powerful characters that seemed to penetrate the paper: "Those who obey the emperor will prosper."

"The cabinet was no longer a behemoth that could rival imperial power. From the moment Yang Tinghe fell from power, whether it was Yan Song later, or Xu Jie after him, all the Grand Secretaries were reduced to dogs in the emperor's hands! Domestic dogs that could be replaced and discarded at any time!"

The live stream chat erupted in a frenzied frenzy. Netizens were thrilled by this extreme reversal of power. The pent-up frustration that had been building throughout the Zhengde reign was completely released in this beating outside Zuoshun Gate.

But there was no joy on Zhu Dijun's face.

He turned around and slowly and deliberately erased the bloodstains from the whiteboard with a blackboard eraser.

"Jiajing won. He honored his biological father, Prince Xingxian, as the late Emperor Gongmu Xian, and forcefully placed his memorial tablet in the Imperial Ancestral Temple. With nearly twenty years of the Great Rites Controversy and the bloodshed of countless people, he achieved the absolute pinnacle of imperial autocracy."

"But what he opened was also a Pandora's box."

Zhu Dijun stopped what he was doing, looked up at the camera, and his eyes were extremely strange.

"When an emperor discovers that violence and slaughter can resolve all political differences; when all the officials and ministers have been broken, leaving only flattery and factionalism."

"This Taoist emperor, who established absolute authority amidst bloodshed, suddenly made a decision that baffled the entire world—he stopped attending court for over twenty years, hiding in his secluded abode in the Western Garden, indulging in cultivation, alchemy, and even engaging in outrageous and perverse acts in his harem!"

The background music in the live stream suddenly became extremely eerie and strange, like a summoning bell ringing deep inside a Taoist temple at midnight.

"Then why didn't Emperor Jiajing attend court? Was the Ming Dynasty's government truly controlled by that treacherous minister named Yan Song?"

Zhu Dijun's voice grew lower and lower, carrying a penetrating power that sent chills down one's spine.

"If you think Jiajing was lazy, you're being too naive."

The large screen suddenly plunged into endless darkness, leaving only the afterimage of an incense burner shimmering with a ghostly green light.

"When you gaze into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you. Let's begin by analyzing why Emperor Jiajing stopped attending court."