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

"My family, that blood-stained beating at Zuoshun Gate certainly rubbed the dignity of the Ming Dynasty's scholar-officials to the ground. But do you really think that these high-ranking officials who control the lifeline of the empire will obediently admit defeat and submit after being beaten a few dozen times?"

Zhu Dijun stood in front of the whiteboard, a rag in his hand, scrubbing the bloodstain map of Zuoshun Gate until it was spotless. He turned around and slammed a huge map of the Ming-Mongol border defense line onto the large screen.

"You've seriously underestimated the bottom line these people have! You've also seriously underestimated the utterly depraved things the civil service is capable of doing to maintain their power!"

A black marker drew a thick, bold black line across the whiteboard, running from north to south.

"As we mentioned earlier, the civil officials and gentry along the southeastern coast, driven by smuggling profits, were willing to don the clothes of Japanese ronin and become pirates, causing harm to their compatriots for forty-four years! What about the northern defenses?"

Zhu Dijun pressed his hands firmly on the podium, staring intently at the camera, his eyes filled with hostility.

"The civil service in the north and the powerful merchant groups in Datong also have an extremely stable and extremely brutal 'strategic partner'! Moreover, in the more than two hundred years of Ming Dynasty history, the timing of every time these people jumped out to cause trouble was chillingly precise!"

Four large characters, smack with a strong sense of bloodshed, were slammed onto the public screen: 【Tartar Invasion of Guan】!

"In the third year of the Jiajing reign! At the height of the Great Rites Controversy and the most devastating Datong Mutiny, the civil official group once again turned to their old smuggling partners in the borderlands—the Mongol Tatars! They intended to use the flames of war on the frontier to inflict the most lethal physical pressure on the fifteen-year-old emperor in the Forbidden City!"

The live stream chat paused briefly, then erupted with a deluge of exclamation marks.

"Holy crap?! They're doing this again?! Bringing in Japanese pirates from the south and Mongols from the north?!"

"Are these civil officials treating the Ming Dynasty's defense as a remote control for their political coup? Can they just press the button whenever they want?!"

"Hateboys, come out here! Don't tell me this is just another coincidence!"

Zhu Dijun suddenly kicked the chair next to him away, making a screeching sound.

"Is it just a coincidence? Let's compare the timeline with the official historical records of the Ming Dynasty! Let's see what kind of absurd and horrific series of bloody incidents broke out in the northern border of the Ming Dynasty in the third year of the Jiajing reign!"

The red laser pointer, like a dripping dagger, is firmly embedded in the image of Datong, Shanxi, on the screen.

"First case! In March of the third year of the Jiajing reign! Altan Khan, the strongman of the Mongol Tatar tribe, for the first time explicitly launched a large-scale invasion of Datong!"

Zhu Dijun wrote the word "March" heavily on the whiteboard, then pointed to the word "February" on the left.

"Do you remember the timeline?! What happened in February of the third year of the Jiajing reign?!"

"After his failed attempt to defy the Great Rites Controversy against Emperor Jiajing, Grand Secretary Yang Tinghe submitted his resignation and was granted permission by the emperor to retire. He was sent back to his hometown! With Yang Tinghe gone, the entire civil service lost its greatest protector and was in a desperate situation of leaderlessness and extreme panic!"

"No sooner had Chief Minister Yang left than, in March, Altan Khan's cavalry, with unparalleled precision, breached the border gates of Datong!"

A cold, mocking light flickered in Judy Jun's eyes.

"What kind of place is Datong? It's the core hub of the nine border towns of the Ming Dynasty, where smuggling is rampant and the collusion between civil officials and Shanxi merchants is deepest! The garrison commander of Datong just killed the governor in a mutiny, and the border defense is in complete disarray. Why did Anda have to come at this most critical juncture? Did he install radar in his own home to monitor the Ming court?!"

"There's no radar at all! There's only a damn mole!" Judy Jun roared at the top of her lungs.

"This is clearly a smuggling ring on the border who, seeing their powerful backer in the court had fallen, immediately tipped off Anda! They let the Mongols lead troops to cause a big disturbance on the border, using the mess at the border defense to force the emperor to compromise and back down!"

The image on the big screen suddenly changed.

The red dot on the defense line map stretches eastward from Datong, piercing right under Beijing's nose!

"If Anda's attack on Datong was merely a warning shot, then the second case was a blatant act of holding a knife to the emperor's throat!"

Two bloodstained names were pinned to the center of the screen.

"In May of the third year of the Jiajing reign! The young prince, the Great Khan of the Mongol Tatars, personally led the main force to launch a forceful attack on Shitangling in Miyun!"

Zhu Dijun grabbed the pointer and slammed it hard onto the coordinates of Miyun, making a loud bang.

"Family members! Look at the map! Where is Miyun?! It's in the heart of the capital region! It's only half a day's ride from the Forbidden City where the Emperor resides! This is equivalent to the enemy's knife being pointed right at Jiajing's nose!"

"During this extremely bizarre invasion, Yin Long, the Ming commander defending Miyun, was killed in action!"

Zhu Dijun crossed his arms, his eyes as cold as the wind in the dead of winter.

"After Yang Tinghe's downfall, Wang Jun led 250 high-ranking officials in a petition to force the emperor to abdicate. The emperor refused to budge. Immediately afterwards, the Mongols marched directly to Miyun and killed a high-ranking commander of the Ming Dynasty."

"Did you understand the malicious subtext?"

Zhu Dijun moved closer to the camera, his voice low and hoarse, "The civil official group is using the young prince as a weapon to address the fifteen-year-old Jiajing Emperor—if you don't acknowledge your father, the military generals on the Ming Dynasty's frontiers will die in droves! If you don't acknowledge your father, the Mongol hooves can trample into the Forbidden City at any time!"

The Yongle Era of the Ming Dynasty.

Emperor Chengzu Zhu Di sat upright on the dragon throne, his eyes bloodshot, his fingernails digging into the carved wood grain of the throne.

"Yin Long died in battle... The military generals of the Ming Dynasty did not die on the road of conquering new territories, but actually died in the political meat grinder set up by their own civil officials?!" Zhu Di's voice was filled with a murderous intent that could destroy the world.

He led five expeditions to the northern deserts, routing the Tatars and Oirats like stray dogs. In his eyes, the lives of Ming soldiers were invincible weapons capable of sweeping across the land! But now, this same weapon has become a disposable commodity used by later civil officials to threaten the emperor and to bargain!

"These pedantic, pedantic scholars who eat human food but don't excrete human waste!" Zhu Di slammed his hand down on the imperial desk in front of him, shattering it.

"They're gambling with the lives of their soldiers! They're playing with the fate of the Ming Dynasty!"

In the modern live stream room, some people also raised questions in the barrage comments.

"Brother Jun, I checked the History of Ming Dynasty. Some of these events are recorded in the second year of the Jiajing reign, and some in the third year. Is there a discrepancy in the timeline?"

Zhu Dijun looked at this comment and let out an extremely arrogant laugh.

"Good question! You checked the History of Ming and found the timeline is fragmented, right? This is the most shameless and cunning cover-up tactic used by these civil officials!"

He slammed a phantom image of the "History of Ming Dynasty: Annals of Emperor Shizong" onto the screen and drew a huge red X on it.

"The History of Ming was compiled by Qing Dynasty officials, and the draft was based on the Veritable Records of the Ming Dynasty! These historians knew better than anyone that if they had simply recorded Anda's invasion of Datong, the Little Prince's attack on Miyun, and the death of Commander Yin Long in battle, all within the few months of the Great Rites Controversy in the third year of the Jiajing reign, anyone with a brain could see at a glance that this was a complete and elaborate scheme to force the emperor to abdicate!"

"So how did they change it?"

Zhu Dijun's finger tapped frantically on the whiteboard. "They deliberately misplaced the years! They changed some events to the second year of the Jiajing reign! They ripped the timeline apart! This is an attempt to use obfuscation to cover up this shocking case of treason and coup!"

"But a lie is a lie! No matter how they alter the calendar, the key figures, locations, and outcomes for the fallen generals in the event simply don't fit the logic of their cover-up!"

The red laser pointer lit up again, completing the final piece of this deadly puzzle.

"The third case! The final act of this bloody drama!"

Zhu Dijun wrote the two large characters "August" directly on the far right side of the whiteboard.

"The timeline goes back to July 15th of the third year of Jiajing's reign. The Zuoshun Gate massacre broke out. Jiajing used more than 180 lashes to beat 17 high-ranking civil officials to death, breaking the backbone of the civil officials."

"Only one month later! It was August!"

"The Mongol prince's army has once again amassed in a frenzied assault, launching a second attack on Dingzibao, the defensive line of Datong! This offensive is more ferocious than any before! Wang Gang, the Ming Dynasty's Grand Commander, was killed in action during this defensive battle!"

Zhu Dijun slammed the pointer to the ground.

"What a slap in the face! This is blatant revenge for the seventeen civil officials who died outside Zuoshun Gate!"

"You think you're so great, Emperor? You dare to beat civil officials to death with court rods? Fine! Then the month after you beat someone, the Mongols will kill one of your commanders at the border! A life for a life! You kill civil officials, I'll have foreign barbarians kill your military generals!"

The entire live stream fell into a suffocating silence. No one doubted that this was a coincidence anymore. This extremely brutal, bloody, and causally clear retaliatory invasion shattered the last remaining illusions everyone had about the civil officials of the Ming Dynasty.

To fight for the title of "father" and to preserve the privileges they hold.

They could instigate the Nanjing plague and refuse to save lives, manipulate the Datong mutiny to kill the governor, and even directly lead the Mongol Tatar cavalry to trample the borders of the Ming Dynasty and sacrifice the lives of high-ranking officials to the heavens.

In a parallel Chongzhen era of the Ming Dynasty.

As Zhu Youjian looked at the images of Yin Long and Wang Gang dying one after another on the sky, his whole body trembled uncontrollably. He thought of the repeated defeats on the Liaodong battlefield, and of the Donglin Party members who always complained of poverty to him but secretly smuggled grain and ironware to the Jurchens.

"So it turns out that since the Jiajing era... these people have already mastered the art of colluding with foreign enemies."

Zhu Youjian gave a bitter laugh, slumped onto the dragon throne, his eyes filled with despair.

On the sky, Zhu Dijun suppressed all his mania, crossed his hands and rested them on his chin, his eyes becoming incredibly deep.

"Internally, civil officials were collectively forcing the emperor to abdicate; externally, the Mongol army was pressing in; the border defense system was completely rotten. Even though Jiajing managed to suppress the court through the beating at Zuoshun Gate, who would defend this Ming dynasty riddled with problems?"

The screen went black instantly. The back of an extremely thin fifteen-year-old boy stood alone in the empty Forbidden City square.

"He doesn't even have a single, truly capable elite army under his command. All military power is in the hands of those local civil and military officials who outwardly comply but inwardly defy him."

Zhu Dijun's voice was like a cold wind from hell.

Faced with an absolute military impasse, the fifteen-year-old Zhu Houcong made an extremely reckless decision. He wanted to use this border war, which was triggered by civil officials, to forcibly rejuvenate the military system of the Ming Dynasty.