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

The studio lights flickered wildly, their cold blue glow illuminating the scene. Zhu Dijun stood before the large screen, casually erasing the gruesome images of the Mutianyu massacre. He grabbed a half-used piece of chalk from the table and forcefully drew a huge hollow circle on the whiteboard.

"Family members, what are we fighting for? We're fighting for our lives! But ultimately, we're fighting for money!"

Judy Jun's pointer slammed into the center of the hollow circle.

"Mutianyu fell, and Datong in Shanxi was trampled into a muddy mess by the Mongol cavalry! The entire Ming court and the people were finally in a panic. The Ministry of War was shouting for reinforcements, and the border generals were reaching out for military funds. But at this time, the Minister of Revenue, looking at the national treasury accounts, felt like dying! Because the national treasury was so empty it could run a horse across it!"

He slapped the whiteboard.

"What to do when there's no money? The Ming Dynasty's border defenses can't really collapse completely, can they? So, in order to deal with the ferocious Altan Khan's iron cavalry from the north, the Ming court was forced to initiate an extremely distorted 'wartime financial adjustment'! But this adjustment, to put it bluntly, can be summed up in four words—robbing Peter to pay Paul!"

A line of large, golden characters, reeking of decay, suddenly appeared on the screen: "[Reassign Salt Classes]!"

"The time has come to the nineteenth day of the first month of the twenty-second year of the Jiajing reign!"

Zhu Dijun moved closer to the camera, speaking rapidly like a machine gun.

"What is the salt tax of the Ming Dynasty? It's the absolute lifeline of the state monopoly! It's the core pool of funds used to maintain the administrative operation of the entire empire! But now, this pool has been forcibly drained!"

"The imperial court issued an urgent edict, forcibly reassigning the salt permits (officially issued salt collection certificates) issued by the salt transport offices of Lianghuai and other regions! How much was misappropriated in one go? Over 900,000 permits! Equivalent to over 340,000 taels of silver!"

Zhu Dijun frantically typed on the keyboard, drawing a thick red line indicating the flow of the silver, pointing directly to the northern defense line of the Ming Dynasty.

"This 340,000 taels of silver, not a single coin was left behind; it was all urgently allocated to Xuanfu and Datong! What was it specifically for? To pay for the military expenses of dispatching mercenary troops! These so-called mercenary troops were recruited from other regions!"

The live stream chat exploded instantly.

"Holy crap, they're just throwing the nation's life-saving salt tax revenue at the border as military pay? Are they out of their minds?"

["Yan Song, Xia Yan, Xu Jie, and their gang of civil officials were locked in a fierce power struggle in the court, so much so that the front lines had to sell salt to pay their employees!"]

"This is equivalent to throwing money that should be used to pay the salaries of all civil servants nationwide into hiring temporary workers on the front lines! It's a complete case of drinking poison to quench thirst!"

"The comments were right! This is a desperate act of drinking poison to quench thirst!"

Zhu Dijun let out a desolate, cold laugh. "But my family, do you think that just because the front lines have received 340,000 taels of silver, the Ming Dynasty's border defenses will be secure? Do you think our soldiers will be able to take up arms and cut down the Mongols?"

He drew a heavy red cross on the whiteboard.

"Wrong! Utterly wrong! Even with silver, the border troops still go hungry! Because what the border lacks isn't just silver, it lacks food!"

The screen then shifted to reveal an urgent memorial covered in mud and sand, a document from the Jiajing era of the Ming Dynasty.

"At this critical juncture, Ding Rukui, the governor of Baoding and censor-in-chief, submitted a memorial to the Jiajing Emperor that exposed the very weaknesses of the Ming Dynasty's border defenses!"

Zhu Dijun's pointer struck the words on the memorial page heavily.

"In his memorial to the throne, Ding Rukui tearfully denounced an utterly absurd and deadlocked situation—the drawbacks of amending memorials!"

"What is this 'conversion'? In order to save trouble, or rather, to manipulate the system, the Ming Dynasty forcibly converted the grain that should have been collected into silver for collection! And what was the result? The soldiers received only small amounts of silver as their pay! But my family, Xuanfu and Datong are border areas ravaged by war for years! With the chaos of war, trade routes were cut off, and prices have skyrocketed!"

In a parallel Hongwu era of the Ming Dynasty.

Zhu Yuanzhang gripped the armrests of the dragon throne tightly, his eyes bloodshot with extreme rage.

"They have silver... but can't buy rice. These damned corrupt officials are starving our Ming Dynasty's border guards to death!"

On the sky, Judy Jun's roar was deafening.

Ding Rukui pointed his finger at the imperial court and cursed: "The soldiers have silver in their hands, but outside the camps, they can't buy a single grain of rice! Merchants are hoarding and speculating, selling a shi (a unit of dry measure) of rice at exorbitant prices! The Ming Dynasty's border troops didn't die in battle; they starved to death, clutching their blackened pieces of silver!"

"Therefore, Ding Rukui strongly suggested: We must restore the 'true nature'! What is the true nature? It means directly requisitioning real grain! In years of plenty, we must fill the border granaries with grain, and in years of famine, we must distribute silver! Only when the border granaries are filled with real wheat and millet, and the soldiers are fed, will they have the strength to withstand Anda's sword!"

Viewers in the live stream gave it a thumbs up.

"This Ding Rukui is a pragmatist! He can see the crux of the problem!"

"In times of chaos, gold is valued; one would rather starve than eat silver. Is this such a simple truth that all the officials in the court do not understand?"

"Approve it quickly! If the grain isn't delivered soon, there will be a real uprising at the border!"

"Did the Ministry of Revenue approve it? Yes, they approved it!"

Zhu Dijun's lips curled into an extremely eerie mockery. He turned around and used a black pen to write four large, insidious characters next to Ding Rukui's name: "**Wu Convenience for the People**".

"The officials of the Ministry of Revenue sat in their spacious yamen, and with a stroke of their pens, agreed to restore the original system. But at the end of the imperial edict, they added four extremely insidious words: 'Consider the convenience of the people!' This meant that collecting grain was permissible, but the convenience of the common people must not be disturbed."

Zhu Dijun pulled over a chair and sat down heavily.

"Fellow officials, in the deeply rotten bureaucratic system of the late Ming Dynasty, the phrase 'follow the people's needs' was the most invincible get-out-of-jail-free card for shirking responsibility! Local officials, upon seeing these four words, instantly understood: the court wanted grain but didn't want to bear the responsibility of inciting the people to revolt. So what could I do? I simply refused to accept it! I continued with the silver-for-cash scheme, continued with the deception! Ding Rukui's life-saving memorial thus became nothing more than a piece of paper in the official document process!"

In the AI-generated map, in the border camp of Datong, a starving soldier clutches his spear, staring at a small piece of cheap silver in his hand, his eyes filled with deathly despair.

In a parallel Zhenguan era of the Tang Dynasty.

Li Shimin looked at the sky, slowly closed his eyes, and concealed the extreme disappointment in them.

"The soldiers at the front are starving, while the officials in the court are meticulously crafting their words. With such shirking of responsibility, if the border supply crisis is not resolved, the northern defense line of the Ming Dynasty will be a giant with feet of clay, which will collapse with the slightest push."

"The money was diverted, but the grain wasn't collected. The soldiers on the front lines risked their lives to fill the pits at the foot of the Great Wall in Mutianyu, and went hungry in the cold winds of Xuanda."

Judy Jun's voice suddenly turned low, carrying the deathly stillness before an impending storm.

He suddenly stood up, ripped off all the financial charts on the whiteboard, and drew a huge Bagua diagram in the center with a red marker!

"At this critical juncture, with the Ming Empire already halfway off a cliff and its financial system on the verge of complete collapse, what is the Jiajing Emperor, Zhu Houcong, who was strangled by palace maids with a knotted rope and developed severe paranoia, doing?!"

Four large, blood-red characters crashed onto the public screen—【The Battle of Timber Gathering】!

"March of the 22nd year of the Jiajing reign!"

Zhu Dijun's pointer slammed hard against the screen, making a loud bang.

"Just as the Minister of Revenue was contemplating suicide over the 300,000 taels of military expenditure, and Ding Rukui was frantically submitting memorials to the emperor to ensure the border troops had enough to eat, the Jiajing Emperor issued an edict that caused the entire court to collectively suffer a cardiac arrest!"

An exquisitely detailed map of a royal Taoist temple was pasted in the center of the screen.

"Jiajing could no longer sit still in the Wuyi Hall! He questioned the Ministry of Works: 'Why has the precious timber I used to build the palace for cultivating immortality and communicating with the gods been delayed for so long and still hasn't arrived in the capital?! If the gods were to blame us, who among you could bear the consequences?!'"

At that moment, the entire online audience held their breath.

"Holy crap?!?!"

"The country is in such a mess from the war, and he's still urging for timber to repair the house?!"

"Where the hell is my knife?! Drag this old cultivator out of the West Garden and chop him up!!"

"There's no food at the front, so he wants to build a Taoist temple in the rear?!"

"This is the supreme ruler of the Ming Dynasty!" Zhu Dijun roared, his eyes filled with a palpable ferocity.

"Jiajing didn't care how many people died on the border; he only cared about whether he could live forever! He thought the Mongol invasion was a natural disaster, but the real reason the Ming Dynasty was doomed was because the Taoist temples were not properly repaired and had angered Heaven!"

Two portraits of high-ranking officials dressed in scarlet robes were dragged directly onto the screen.

"Jiajing not only urged them on, he also directly appointed officials! He specially dispatched Fan Jizu, the Minister of Works, to personally oversee the procurement of large timbers in Huguang, neglecting the defenses and engineering projects of the capital! At the same time, he appointed Pan Jian, an official, to be in charge of the timber procurement projects in Sichuan!"

Zhu Dijun frantically drew circles on the map in Hubei and Sichuan.

"Family members! Going deep into the mountains and forests to cut down several towering trees that are too big for one person to hug, and then transporting them to Beijing by crossing mountains and rivers! What does this mean?! The cost of getting a single large tree out of the mountains is tens of thousands of taels of silver! Hundreds or even thousands of laborers will die along the way! This is an absolute human tragedy, an ultimate bottomless pit that is even more terrifying than the military expenses at the front!"

In a parallel Zhengde era of the Ming Dynasty.

Zhu Houzhao crushed the wine cup in his hand, oblivious to the blood trickling down his cut palm. He stared intently at the sky, gritting his teeth as he cursed:

"Absurd! Utterly absurd! They have no money to feed the soldiers, but they have money to cut down trees in the deep mountains to build those dilapidated houses for shady purposes! Handing the throne to him is simply pushing the Ming Dynasty to its doom!"

"Zhu Houcong, have you forgotten the assassination attempt that just happened? Without military power, if a palace maid can strangle you once, she'll do it again!"

The studio lights turned a completely oppressive dark red.

"In front is Anda's curved sword, in the middle are greedy and insatiable civil officials who pass the buck to each other, and behind is a selfish emperor who hides in the West Garden, sucking marrow and bones, seeking only to become an immortal."

Zhu Dijun casually tossed the chalk onto the table, making a dull thud.

He looked at the camera, a cold smile that was more like a grimace than a cry.

"The national strength of the Ming Dynasty was being slowly and painstakingly torn apart by this absurd infighting between the emperor and his ministers. Border soldiers were starving to death, laborers were dying from exhaustion, and smuggling rings in Jiangnan were making money like madmen."

The image on the large screen gradually shrank, transforming into a massive log stained with blood, struggling to move forward on the shoulders of hundreds of emaciated laborers.

"The winter of the twenty-second year of the Jiajing reign was unusually cold."

Judy Jun's voice was so soft it sounded like he was reciting a eulogy.

"But what's even more chilling is the impending political storm. Because it has been discovered that while the emperor is indulging in wood and elixirs, Xu Jie, who has always been subservient in the court, has finally begun a secret and deadly scheme."

He leaned forward slightly, a chilling excitement gleaming in his eyes.

"Who says Confucian officials don't resort to underhanded tactics?"