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

A parallel Yongle era in the Ming Dynasty.

The deathly silence inside the Fengtian Hall was instantly shattered by the piercing sound of the electronic alarm.

Zhu Di had just finished sighing in his heart when he looked up and saw Zhu Dijun's face with a strange smile on the sky.

"There are other experts?"

Zhu Di slammed his hand on the imperial desk, a bloodthirsty glint rekindling in his eyes. He wanted to see what darker secrets this kid from later generations could uncover from this mess.

Inside a modern live streaming studio.

Zhu Dijun casually tossed the thermos on the table and slammed his fingers down on the keyboard.

The image on the big screen suddenly changed, and a densely packed, musty-looking old archive image was suddenly displayed to the entire online audience.

"Family, the lighthearted part of the novel is over. Let's continue with the most ruthless political dissection, to discuss another conspiracy theory suggesting Xia Yan had to die!"

Three large, blood-red characters lit up at the top of the screen: 【Veritable Records of Emperor Shizong of Ming】!

"Since some people say I'm talking nonsense, let's go straight for the official, irrefutable evidence from the Ming Dynasty! Let's use the history books written by their own civil officials to expose their last shred of decency!"

Zhu Dijun grabbed the pointer and lashed it hard across the first file.

"Time! July to October of the 24th year of the Jiajing reign! Focus—[The reorganization of the Beijing garrison]!"

Guided by his pointer, several passages of classical Chinese were highlighted and enlarged.

"Volume 301, July record: 'The capital army has recently been transferred from the eight branches to defend Jizhou, and there is a shortage of men to guard the city. It is advisable to select strong soldiers and train them together with the four guards of Tengxiang; the old and weak should be allowed to fill in as substitutes, and if there are still not enough, the surplus should be added; if there are still not enough, recruits should be made to ensure that the original quota is met.'"

"Volume 304, October record: 'Reorganize camp affairs, seek out and recommend talented generals; former admirals return to their residences, eunuchs are dismissed; each camp recommends capable individuals to report.'"

"There's a lot of text here, so let me translate the nuclear-level information for you!"

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

"The field army of the Ming capital was transferred to the northern defense line, leaving the capital vulnerable. At this time, the court proposed to recruit new soldiers and reorganize the military. On the surface, this seems like a belated but necessary measure, beneficial to the country and its people, right?"

He sneered and drew a huge red X over the five characters "Eunuch Officials Removed"!

"But you damn well better read this carefully! [Eunuchs to be dismissed!] What are eunuchs?! They're just eunuchs!"

Zhu Dijun slammed his hands on the podium and roared angrily:

"From the founding of the Ming Dynasty, to prevent military generals from rebelling and to prevent civil officials from seizing power, who did the emperor most like to send to supervise the army?! His household servants, the eunuchs! The inner court eunuchs were the emperor's last leash to control military power!"

"But in the twenty-fourth year of the Jiajing reign, under the pretext of reorganizing the Beijing garrison, these people directly dismissed and sent back to their hometowns all the eunuchs that the emperor had placed in the Beijing army! Then they stipulated that the officers in charge of each battalion should be recommended by the Ministry of War in conjunction with the generals! In other words, the civil official group should recommend them themselves!"

The live stream chat paused for a moment, followed by a screen full of question marks.

"Holy crap? They just kicked out the emperor's military supervisor?!"

"This is like seizing military power in the capital of the Ming Dynasty!"

"This is terrifying to think about! They replaced the security captain with one of their own people right under our noses! They've stopped pretending!"

"You think that's all?"

Judy Jun didn't give the audience a chance to breathe, and then threw out two more top-secret files.

On the left side of the screen, smoke billows; on the right side, towering waves crash.

"Let's take another look at what the northern and southern ends of the Ming Dynasty looked like in the twenty-fourth year of the Jiajing reign!"

The pointer is stuck on the northern map on the left.

"Throughout the year! Altan Khan of the Mongols continued to harass Datong and Xuanfu! The battles were extremely fierce! Ming army commander-in-chief Zhang Da was killed in action! Deputy commander-in-chief Lin Chun was killed in action! The Ming Dynasty's northern defense line was directly breached and collapsed!"

"The imperial court had no choice but to send Qiu Luan as the commander-in-chief of Xuanfu and Datong. What did Qiu Luan do? He didn't dare to fight at all! He directly bribed Altan Khan with a large sum of money, buying peace and letting the Mongols turn around and plunder others!"

A look of utter mockery flashed in Zhu Dijun's eyes.

"What was Xia Yan doing at this time? He was strongly supporting Zeng Xian, the Governor-General of Shaanxi, in the imperial court for his plan to 'recover the Hetao region'! He advocated taking the initiative and was directly opposing Yan Song's appeasement policy!"

The pointer swept across, striking the map of the southeastern coast on the right.

"At the same time! Southeast coastal defenses! New Japanese pirates have arrived in great numbers! They have invaded Taizhou and Wenzhou in Zhejiang! Hundred-household commander Chen Chun and registrar Ye Zong have died in battle! The Japanese pirates are not only burning, killing, and looting along the coast, but have even penetrated deep inland, threatening Nanjing, the secondary capital of the Ming Dynasty!"

"The imperial court has taken action again, appointing Zhu Wan as the governor of Zhejiang, overseeing the coastal defenses of Fujian and Zhejiang, and dedicating himself to suppressing the Japanese pirates!"

Zhu Dijun pulled up a chair and sat down heavily. The lights in the entire studio turned an extremely oppressive dark red.

He looked at the camera, his voice low and deep, like a whisper from hell.

"The northern defense line collapsed, and the southern coastal defense was in disarray. The region was in complete chaos. At the end of this chaotic situation, in December of the twenty-fourth year of the Jiajing Emperor's reign, the Jiajing Emperor issued a fatal imperial edict."

In the center of the screen, a line of golden characters suddenly appeared: "[Order Xia Yan to reorganize the capital garrison]".

"Reduce the old and weak, replenish the elite, and increase military spending. All of this will be coordinated by Grand Secretary Xia Yan!"

Dead silence.

Whether it was the millions of netizens in the live stream or the emperors of the Ming Dynasty in countless parallel universes, they all felt a chill run down their spines the moment they saw the puzzle pieces completely put together.

Zhu Dijun suddenly stood up and kicked the chair over.

"Family members! Do you understand the cause-and-effect relationship here?!"

He spread his arms and roared wildly at the holographic screen.

"Connect these three threads! Don't look at it from the perspective of a noble minister protecting his country; look at it from the most vicious perspective of a power struggle!"

"In the north! Xia Yan is determined to protect Zeng Xian and replace the 100,000 elite border troops in Datong, Shaanxi with his own men, using the pretext of recovering the Hetao region to embezzle a massive amount of the Ministry of Revenue's military funds!"

"To the south! Next to Xia Yan's Jiangxi gang's stronghold, the Zhejiang governor Zhu Wan holds the power of the Southeast Admiral, wielding life and death over the suppression of Japanese pirates and maritime smuggling!"

"The central capital! Taking advantage of the fact that the eight branches of the capital army were transferred away and the troops were left weak, Xia Yan used the emperor's edict to kick aside the eunuch supervisor and place the Ministry of War and his own recommended people into the 12th Regiment of the capital garrison!"

A red marker was used to draw lines wildly on the whiteboard, creating a huge, blood-dripping triangle that tightly connected Datong, Zhejiang, and Beijing!

"This isn't some kind of defense reorganization! This is clearly a complete takeover of the entire Ming Dynasty's military power by the civil service in the 24th year of the Jiajing Emperor's reign!"

In a parallel Hongwu era of the Ming Dynasty.

Zhu Yuanzhang gasped, his withered fingers gripping the edge of the imperial desk so tightly that he didn't even notice his nails curling and bleeding.

"What a grand scheme..."

Zhu Yuanzhang's voice was hoarse, like sandpaper scraping. "They control the border armies to intimidate the foreign vassals, they control the coastal defenses to monopolize the financial resources, and now they're even replacing my own imperial guards with their protégés and former subordinates! These traitors who have studied the classics are digging a grave for the Ming emperors to die out!"

In a parallel Zhengde era of the Ming Dynasty.

Zhu Houzhao stared intently at the sky, the veins bulging on his hand gripping the Embroidered Spring Blade.

"I see……"

He gritted his teeth and sneered.

"Yang Yiqing wanted to do the same thing back then! They wanted more than just money; they wanted to control the emperor's life and death! If the emperor disobeyed, they could send troops straight into the Western Garden!"

"Was Emperor Jiajing, sitting in the Wuyi Hall, a fool?"

Zhu Dijun's voice echoed in the hall, each word filled with anguish.

"No! He's a genius of political maneuvering! When he received the top-secret intelligence from the Imperial Guard, when he connected Zeng Xian of Datong, Zhu Wan of Taizhou, and Xia Yan of the capital, Jiajing was absolutely drenched in cold sweat!"

On the big screen, Jiajing's withered face, as he cultivated immortality, was magnified infinitely, his eyes revealing extreme fear and insane killing intent.

"The emperor has found himself a commander without an army! The Northern Field Army belongs to Xia Yan, the Southern Navy is controlled by civil officials, and now even the gatekeepers of Beijing aren't listening to the eunuchs anymore; they're all listening to the Minister of War and the Grand Secretary!"

Zhu Dijun slapped Xia Yan's name with a loud bang.

"This is no longer a smuggling case! This is a bloodless military coup!"

"Xia Yan was not only the Grand Secretary, but at that moment, in the eyes of the suspicious emperor, he was practically the Grand Marshal of the Ming Dynasty's armies!"

"According to the ancestral rules of the Ming Dynasty, civil officials are not allowed to command troops! You, a fellow Jiangxi native, not content with holding a pen in your hand, you also want to wield a sword?!"

Zhu Dijun moved closer to the camera, his eyes as cold as ice.

"Let's go back and look at why Qiu Luan bribed Anda, and why he later went to Yan Song to report Zeng Xian!"

"Because Zeng Xian wasn't there to fight in the north; he was there to purge the territory! Old warlords like Qiu Luan discovered that their military power and their source of income from embezzling funds had all been taken away by Zeng Xian, the imperial envoy representing civil officials! He was not satisfied! He refused to accept it! He would rather send money to the Mongols or even side with Yan Song than fail to overturn Xia Yan's scheme!"

"Yan Song, with keen insight, grasped the Jiajing Emperor's extreme panic at the complete loss of military power. He conveniently handed him the knife labeled 'Colluding with close attendants, plotting treason!'"

The red lights in the studio were flashing wildly, like the dying alarm of the Ming Dynasty.

Zhu Dijun pressed his hands firmly on the table, ending this brutal analysis.

"Therefore, Xia Yan had to die. Zeng Xian had to die. Zhu Wan was later forced to his death by the civil official group. This was not Yan Song's doing alone; it was the Ming imperial power's desperate counterattack against the civil official group in order to regain military power!"

"Jiajing had Xia Yan dragged to the marketplace and beheaded him to show all the civil officials in the land: Anyone who dares to touch my sword will have their head chopped off!"

"But what was the cost of this massive purge?"

Zhu Dijun casually tossed the blackboard eraser into a corner, making a dull thud.

The entire holographic screen was instantly engulfed by raging flames and corpses scattered all over the ground.

"The price was that capable generals died. A chief minister who dared to reform defenses died. A governor who dared to investigate smuggling committed suicide."

"The gates of the Ming Dynasty were smashed to pieces by the emperor and his powerful ministers. Anda's iron cavalry and Wang Zhi's Japanese pirate fleet began their final, half-century-long revelry on the corpses of the Ming border troops."

Zhu Dijun leaned forward slightly, his eyes reflecting the raging flames on the screen.

"But family, have the civil service of the Ming Dynasty been terrified by this wave of attacks? Is the Ming Dynasty truly at peace after Yan Song came to power?"

He gave a cold laugh, lowering his voice in an extremely eerie manner.

"Next, I'm going to show you a super weirdo in the history of the Ming Dynasty who was extremely perverse, who took corruption to an extreme level, and who even Yan Song had to call him 'father'..."