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

"Family members, I just mentioned the Datong Mutiny. Those who know a little about the history of the Ming Dynasty should know that the Datong Mutiny during the Jiajing reign was recorded in historical books as occurring twice!"

Zhu Dijun stood in front of the whiteboard, his black marker heavily drawing two glaring circles on the year axis.

"The first time was in the third year of the Jiajing reign, at the beginning of the Great Rites Controversy, when a mutiny killed Governor Zhang Wenjin. But the second nuclear bomb we're talking about, which obliterated the entire northwestern defense line of the Ming Dynasty, left nothing but its undergarments, occurred in—the twelfth year of the Jiajing reign!"

He turned around abruptly, pressing his hands firmly onto the podium, his eyes extremely sharp.

"Why, after nine years, have the warlords and their retainers in Datong drawn their swords again? Is it because the conflicts on the border are irreconcilable? Is it because the Tatars have invaded the border again?"

Not entirely correct!

Judy Jun yelled at the top of her lungs.

"Besides what we mentioned earlier about the imperial court's compromises and concessions to local warlords, which led to their escalating demands, the most fundamental reason was the ultimate eruption of internal factional strife and economic pressure within the Ming Dynasty! It was the powder keg at the central level that directly ignited the fuse at the local level!"

The map of the Datong defense line on the big screen suddenly disappeared, replaced by two figures in crimson official robes who had once stood side by side but now glared at each other angrily.

"In the eleventh year of the Jiajing reign! This political meat grinder, known as the aftermath of the Great Rites Controversy, reached its climax with its final showdown!"

Zhu Dijun grabbed the red laser pointer, which, like a bloodstained bayonet, was plunged into the figure on the left.

"Yang Yiqing, the Grand Secretary of the Ming Dynasty, a cunning old fox who served through the reigns of the Chenghua, Hongzhi, and Zhengde emperors!"

The laser pointer swung sharply, slicing hard across the throat of the figure on the right.

"Zhang Cong, the Second Grand Secretary of the Ming Dynasty, a vicious thug who fought his way out of countless civil officials' bloodshed during the Great Rites Controversy—that is, Zhang Fujing!"

"These two were originally allies who joined forces to suppress Yang Tinghe's old faction during the Great Rites Controversy! But now that imperial power is completely consolidated, allies have become stumbling blocks that must be eliminated!"

Zhu Dijun's lips curled into an extremely mocking sneer.

"Zhang Fujing, a newly rich man who climbed the ranks by guessing the emperor's wishes and wielding the emperor's butcher's knife, craves absolute power! How could he possibly tolerate a veteran official with disciples and former subordinates spread throughout the land, a man who has served three dynasties, above him?"

On the screen, a dense barrage of impeachment memorials rained down on Yang Yiqing's portrait.

"Zhang Fujing secretly instructed his trusted officials to launch a fierce attack on Yang Yiqing! They impeached him for corruption, bribery, and forming cliques! They even dug up all the old dirt about Yang Yiqing's collusion with the Grand Eunuch Zhang Yong during the Zhengde reign!"

In a parallel Zhengde era of the Ming Dynasty.

Inside the Leopard Chamber, Zhu Houzhao, who was originally drunk, sat up abruptly the moment he heard the name "Yang Yiqing" and smashed the wine cup in his hand.

"Good! Well done!"

Zhu Houzhao's eyes were bloodshot as he stared intently at the sky, like a vicious wolf ready to devour its prey.

"In the future, that old scoundrel, in league with the imperial physician, will send me on my way with a bowl of medicine! Now it's finally his turn to be devoured by his vicious hounds! Zhang Cong, bite him to death!"

Inside a modern live streaming studio.

Zhu Dijun casually picked up his water glass, took a sip, and coldly watched the court infighting on the screen.

"Family members, Yang Yiqing was besieged and attacked. What was his first reaction? He went to the emperor to complain! He thought he was a veteran of three reigns and that Jiajing would still help him out of consideration for their past relationship."

"But he overestimated Jiajing's bottom line and underestimated Zhu Houcong's utterly ruthless nature of using and discarding people!"

Four large characters dripping with black blood slammed onto the public screen—【Forced Retirement】!

"Jiajing sat upright on his dragon throne, coldly watching this dog-eat-dog spectacle. He knew perfectly well that Yang Yiqing was old, his aging body no longer capable of yielding any political value, while Zhang Fujing was in his prime, at the height of his lust for power!"

"So, Jiajing Emperor wrote with a flourish of his pen—Yang Yiqing is granted retirement! You old bastard, pack your bags and go back to your hometown!"

boom!

The live stream chat exploded instantly.

"A veteran of three reigns was just kicked out like that? That happened faster than turning the pages of a book!"

[Jiajing Emperor: My cabinet doesn't keep idle people. You're no longer of any use, so hurry up and make room.]

"Zhang Cong's knife is truly sharp; it can even cut down a deeply entrenched old fox like Yang Yiqing."

["Don't forget, that old bastard Yang Yiqing killed Emperor Wuzong Zhu Houzhao, and like Wang Yangming, he is suspected of regicide."]

With Yang Yiqing gone, Zhang Fujing completely seized power and rose to become the Grand Secretary of the Ming Dynasty!

Zhu Dijun pointed to his portrait and said:

"The cabinet has become a complete puppet of the Jiajing Emperor! All dissenting voices in the entire Ming court have been wiped out by these two!"

He grabbed the blackboard eraser and roughly erased Yang Yiqing's name, then drew a huge silver ingot on the whiteboard.

"Now that the troublemakers in the court have been dealt with, what's next? Keep making money!"

"We previously discussed Zhang Fujing's investigation of estates in the ninth year of the Jiajing reign. Did you think this stopped in the eleventh or twelfth year of the Jiajing reign? It didn't stop at all!"

On the screen, the data on the surveyed farmland began to climb wildly from 57,000 hectares.

"Zhang Fujing became the Grand Secretary, and his power increased even more! He immediately wielded this economic weapon, specifically designed to cut down the privileged class, with impenetrable precision!"

"Continuing the policies of the previous two years, the imperial court will continue to forcibly investigate and reclaim the land illegally seized by imperial relatives and founding nobles! Every acre of land will be squeezed out, and they will all be returned to pay taxes!"

The Weiyang Palace of the Han Dynasty.

Liu Bang chewed on his mutton, nodding repeatedly as he watched, then pointed to the sky and laughed heartily:

"This use of rabies dogs is brilliant! The emperor sits there playing the good guy, while his dogs tear off pieces of the nobles' flesh to feed the national treasury! Isn't this exactly what I had Xiao He do back then!"

Zhu Dijun's fingers tapped frantically on the whiteboard.

"Not only did Zhang Fujing investigate and seize estates, but he also defied the vehement remonstrances of the entire court and began to forcibly implement the reform of merging taxes and corvée labor in some areas!"

"This was Zhang Juzheng's early exploration of the Single Whip Law! He converted all the miscellaneous corvée labor imposed on the common people into silver and distributed it to the fields to collect! He wanted to alleviate the burden on the lower classes and prevent them from being forced into becoming salt pirates like Hou Zhongjin!"

Just as a viewer in the live stream was about to type "beneficial to the country and the people," Zhu Dijun's eyes turned as cold as a block of ice.

"The policy is a good policy, but family members, please don't forget what era we live in!"

"This is the damn late Ming Dynasty! A feudal quagmire with no vanguard forces like teachers, no grassroots organization whatsoever, and local areas completely controlled by civil officials and gentry!"

Three large, blood-red characters slammed onto the center of the screen—【It won't work!】

"No matter how sharp Zhang Fujing's blade is, he's still just a civil official sitting in the cabinet approving policies! The governors, prefects, and magistrates under him who are responsible for implementing reforms in the provinces are all from powerful Jiangnan families and local gentry who own thousands of acres of fertile land and have been ruthlessly annexing land!"

As Zhu Dijun drew close to the camera, every word he uttered sounded like a heavy hammer striking glass.

"You're letting these people inspect your own farmland? You're letting them spread taxes across their own land and pay more?!"

"The resistance is unimaginable! Local officials are outwardly compliant but inwardly defiant! Interference from political struggles renders all government orders meaningless once they leave the Forbidden City! These powerful gentry have even secretly shifted the burden of the combined taxes and corvée labor onto the common people and ordinary garrison soldiers once again!"

"By the eleventh and twelfth years of the Jiajing reign, the drawbacks of these economic reforms had become fully apparent. Although the national treasury had more money, the resentment of the nobility had reached unprecedented levels! Local gentry were so enraged with their curses towards Zhang Fujing that they wished they could tear him to pieces!"

The era of Hongwu in the Ming Dynasty.

Zhu Yuanzhang stared coldly at the sky, his withered fingers gripping the armrests of the dragon throne tightly.

"If top-down reforms are not carried out by the people below, the reforms will turn into even more cruel exploitation."

Zhu Yuanzhang's voice carried a deep sense of powerlessness.

"Without a powerful weapon, this dilapidated house will leak three more holes for every one patched up."

On the screen above, Zhu Dijun suddenly stopped all his movements, and the entire live broadcast room fell into a suffocating silence.

Only the red light behind the screen was flickering slightly.

"The Grand Secretary has done so many things that have offended people. All the civil and military officials, nobles and local gentry are secretly watching him, watching the Taoist Emperor in the Forbidden City who uses him as a knife."

"At a time like this, if even the slightest spark were to ignite, Zhang Fujing, that rabid dog, would be instantly pounced on and torn to shreds by everyone."

"And this Mars arrived in the twelfth year of the Jiajing reign."

The image on the big screen suddenly switched to Xiyuan Abode.

With a heart-wrenching cry of an infant, a small corpse wrapped in white silk was carried out of the palace gate by a eunuch.

"In August of the twelfth year of the Jiajing Emperor's reign, his eldest son, Zhu Zaiji, who had just been born, died!"

Zhu Dijun's voice was extremely suppressed.

"In that extremely superstitious era, during that period of political oppression where Zhang Fujing had offended everyone, the death of the eldest prince became the most lethal weapon used by those civil officials and nobles in their counterattack!"

"They immediately began spreading rumors in the shadows, pinning the blame directly on Zhang Fujing! They claimed that Zhang Cong had acted too arbitrarily in recent years, committed too many killings, and even violated ancestral rules during the Great Rites Controversy, thus incurring divine retribution and causing harm to the imperial heir!"

"The death of the eldest prince, Zhu Zaiji, may seem like a tragic loss of an infant in the palace, but it was actually a catalyst for the shift in the political climate of the Jiajing era from 'new' to 'old' and from 'real' to 'virtual.'"

The era of Chongzhen in the Ming Dynasty.

Zhu Youjian looked at the sky and let out a bitter laugh like that of a night owl:

"Divine retribution...it's divine retribution again! Whenever civil officials want to kill someone, Heaven is their best excuse!"

Did the Jiajing Emperor believe it?

Judy Jun spread his hands with a cold smile.

"As intelligent a man as he was, he certainly knew that his political enemies were behind this, but without evidence, Emperor Jiajing completely turned to Taoist superstition, using the excuse of 'two dragons never meet' to evade his paternal affection and responsibility for establishing an heir, which ultimately led to a twenty-year vacancy of the heir apparent and political turmoil in his later years."

"However, Jiajing was an extremely selfish and protective dictator! He had just lost his son, and his mentality had completely collapsed! In addition, Zhang Fujing had indeed seized power in the past two years, and his political enemies had smeared him. Furthermore, the new policies had been slow in the past two years, which aroused suspicion and gave rise to the hidden signs of threatening the imperial power."

"Once the emperor's suspicion arises, it is more terrifying than deadly poison!"

On the screen, the phantom image of Zhang Fujing's official hat crashed down.

"By the end of the twelfth year of the Jiajing reign, Jiajing began to harbor strong resentment towards the Grand Secretary who had once killed all his political enemies. Zhang Fujing, a seasoned veteran of the officialdom who had been licking blood off the blade, immediately sensed the approaching death."

"He was terrified and broke out in a cold sweat. He repeatedly submitted memorials, crying and pleading with the emperor to allow him to retire! Although he had not yet completely fallen from power, Zhang Cong's temporary resignation meant he lost the emperor's absolute trust! But the Jiajing Emperor always retained a special affection for him. In the fourteenth year of Jiajing's reign (1535), he requested to retire due to illness. The Jiajing Emperor bestowed upon him an imperial edict, silver coins, and sent officials to escort him back to his hometown."

"It can be said that Zhang Fujing was the leader of the civil officials in the early Jiajing period, Jiajing's best political ally, a loyal supporter of imperial power, a pragmatic reformer, incorruptible, and courageous in taking on responsibilities."

"In modern-day Longwan, Wenzhou, there is still a memorial hall for him, where people come to pay their respects and offer incense every year."