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

The studio lights came back on, casting a blinding glow on the holographic screen.

Zhu Dijun abruptly straightened up, ripped off his tie, and slammed the dried-out black marker in his hand into the trash can. He grabbed a blood-red marker, and on the map he had just scribbled on, with a swift stroke, he crossed the Shanhaiguan Pass and planted a firm, unyielding line on the icy, snow-covered northeastern defense line!

"Family members! We just talked about the million-dollar false account in the twenty-fourth year of the Jiajing reign, and how these civil officials and nobles of the Beijing Garrison colluded to short-sell the Ming Dynasty's finances! But do you think the price of such greed is merely that five years later, Altan Khan's army besieged Beijing?!"

Judy Jun's eyes were as cold as ice from the deepest hell, and his voice trembled slightly with extreme anger.

"Wrong! Utterly wrong! When the financial center of an empire becomes a feast for a horde of ghouls, its venom will absolutely travel through the veins and spread to the very nerve endings on the empire's outskirts!"

"In the twenty-fifth year of the Jiajing reign! That was the second year of the sham reorganization of the Beijing Garrison! Another pillar of the Ming Empire was shattered by its own people in the icy wilderness of Liaodong in the northeast!"

Three blood-red place names crashed onto the screen—【Duoyan Three Guards】!

Fans familiar with the history of the early and middle Ming Dynasty will definitely recognize these four characters!

Judy Jun's pointer slammed heavily against the whiteboard.

"The Uriyangkhai Three Guards, the northeastern bulwark officially recognized by the Ming Dynasty! From the early Ming Dynasty, this was a physical Great Wall used by the Ming to control other barbarians and resist the southward advance of the Mongols! It was essentially a pack of vicious guard dogs that the Ming Dynasty kept outside the Great Wall!"

A parallel Yongle era in the Ming Dynasty.

Inside the Fengtian Hall, Emperor Yongle (Zhu Di), who was still contemplating how to reorganize the court, suddenly sat up straight the moment he saw the words "Doyan Three Guards." His eyes, which had witnessed countless deaths, flashed with an extremely sharp and fierce light.

He knew this army all too well! Back when he launched the Jingnan Campaign, one of his trump cards was the elite cavalry he borrowed from the Doyan Three Guards! The Ming emperor had always kept this barbarian force under his control with real money and trade rights. Although they occasionally rebelled, they were still a key piece in containing Liaodong.

"What tricks have these idiot descendants played this time?"

Zhu Di gritted his teeth, staring intently at the sky, the veins on the back of his hand resembling the gnarled roots of an old tree.

On the sky, Zhu Dijun spoke as fast as a storm.

"In the twenty-fifth year of the Jiajing reign, a terrifying reshuffling of the geopolitics of the entire Mongolian Plateau was taking place!"

On the holographic map, a giant red arrow is advancing wildly from west to east.

"The Altan Khan we mentioned earlier, who had utterly crushed the nine border regions of the Ming Dynasty, rose to power in the west, becoming increasingly aggressive! Dalaisun Kuden Khan, the leader of the Mongol Left Wing, also known as Dalaisun, was repeatedly defeated by Altan Khan. In order to survive, Dalaisun was forced to lead a massive eastward migration of 100,000 people, directly surging into the Xiliao River basin!"

Zhu Dijun drew an extremely frustrating dead end at the location of the Xiliao River.

"When this torrent of 100,000 people comes, who the hell is the most unlucky?! It's the Doyan Three Guards stationed here!"

"Family members, put yourselves in the shoes of the three guards of Duoyan at that time!"

Zhu Dijun pressed his hands firmly against the podium, getting close to the camera.

"They were now in a desperate situation, attacked from both sides! Behind them were the Mongol Left Wing cavalry, closing in with their swords; in front of them stood the Ming Dynasty's border wall, which strictly forbade crossing! Their living space was being ruthlessly squeezed, their pastures were being seized, and they even had no cattle or sheep to eat!"

"The Doyan Three Guards are desperate! Like mad dogs cornered, they desperately need to exchange their horses for food and ironware at the Ming Dynasty's horse market to survive! They've even secretly contacted Ming border generals, offering to betray military intelligence about the Mongol Left Wing, just hoping the Ming Dynasty will provide them with military protection or open trade to give them a way out!"

The live stream chat was filled with comments.

"This is a golden opportunity! A combination of sowing discord and winning over allies will solidify the Liaodong defense line!"

"If I were a border general, I would definitely open the floodgates wide at this moment and use grain to completely bind the Doyan Three Guards to the Ming Dynasty's war machine!"

"Yes! Any general with a modicum of sense knows that this is the time to lend a hand to their comrades!"

Zhu Dijun let out an extremely chilling laugh, the sound echoing in the studio and sending shivers down everyone's spine.

"But did these corrupt officials who served during the Jiajing reign have any concept of national strategy?! No! Their minds were filled with nothing but piles of silver!"

Zhu Dijun grabbed the blackboard eraser and slapped it onto the whiteboard.

"Let's look at this in conjunction with the previous chapter! Under the guise of rectification, the civil officials and the Ministry of War in the capital embezzled one million taels of military funds from the national treasury! This led to the rations and pay at the border being cut at every level, and by the time they reached Liaodong, there wasn't a single copper coin left, let alone silver!"

"Zhang Feng, the General of Liaodong! This greedy general with a head full of fat and gluttony, looking at the empty military pay ledger in his hands, how is he going to make money?! He wielded his butcher's knife with extreme precision, slashing at the Doyan Three Guards who came to the trade market to make a living!"

On the screen, the face of a Ming Dynasty military general, filled with greed and arrogance, appeared.

"Zhang Feng has been withholding supplies from the horse market for a long time! You bring several top-quality horses to exchange for grain, and he only gives you a pile of moldy chaff! He has embezzled all the funds allocated by the imperial court for maintaining stability in the trade market! The herders of the Doyan Three Guards are starving, and their pent-up resentment is like a powder keg ready to explode at any moment!"

"It was during a routine trade fair that year that the fuse was ignited in an extremely cruel way by a mentally challenged military officer named Chen Shoujie!"

The lights in the entire studio instantly turned blood red!

At the trade market, angry tribal people gathered, demanding a fair trade from Zhang Feng! They didn't want charity; they just wanted to exchange their horses for enough food to survive!

Zhu Dijun suddenly raised his arm and made a slamming motion in mid-air.

"Chen Shoujie, the commander of the Ming army's central army! Faced with this group of enraged merchants, he not only failed to appease them, but instead committed an atrocity that pushed the Ming Dynasty's Liaodong defense line directly into an abyss of no return!"

"He grabbed a heavy military hammer, led his guards, and charged into the crowd! Without a word, he swung the hammer hard at the head of the leading trade representative!"

Boom! A shocking cloud of blood mist exploded on the holographic screen.

"His brains splattered on the spot! Flesh and blood flew everywhere! Steaming blood splattered directly onto the horses being traded and the dried dust! An unarmed tribal chief, representing his tribe and seeking a way to survive, was beaten to death like a dog in front of the horse market by Ming Dynasty officers!"

A parallel Yongle era in the Ming Dynasty.

Zhu Di kicked over the rosewood imperial desk in front of him! The loud noise made the officials in the hall kneel on the ground, trembling.

"brute!!!"

Zhu Di's eyes were bloodshot, like a tiger ready to devour its prey, and a desperate roar escaped his throat. "Even in war, envoys are not killed! To execute those begging for food in the marketplace is to drive them to their deaths! How did such greedy, brainless swine manage to climb to the position of Commander-in-Chief of Liaodong?!"

Zhu Di trembled with rage. He knew all too well the ferocity of foreign tribes. You could subdue a wolf on the grasslands, but you absolutely could not trample on its dignity for a few scraps when it was starving and begging for food. This hammer blow shattered not only a man's head, but also the Ming Dynasty's reputation in Liaodong for over a century!

On the sky, Zhu Dijun's voice already exuded a strong murderous aura.

"This single blow ignited a powder keg that had been building up for a century!"

"What was once a bustling and noisy horse market instantly transformed into a living hell! The 'barbarians' who witnessed the massacre of their compatriots let out extremely mournful roars! They no longer cared about the Ming Dynasty's border restrictions, nor about the majesty of the Celestial Empire! They drew their scimitars and surged towards the Ming army's defenses like a tidal wave!"

On the screen, flames and the setting sun intertwine, and a solitary military fortress trembles violently amidst the smoke of battle.

"The retaliation came swiftly and with extreme brutality! The enraged Allied Forces of the Doyan Three Guards launched a frenzied siege on the Ming Dynasty's military stronghold—Zhenlutai!"

Zhu Dijun moved closer to the camera, his fingers gripping the edge of the podium tightly.

"On the beacon tower of Zhenlutai, the smoke from the battle was completely soaked with the blood of the defending soldiers! The Ming army was forced into retreat by these mad beasts! When the city walls were breached, there were no survivors! The shouts of battle, the sound of weapons piercing flesh and bones cracking, and the mournful cries of warhorses mingled together!"

"This Zhenlutai, a symbol of the might of the Ming Dynasty, ultimately fell completely amidst a sea of ​​fire and mountains of corpses! The Ming garrison inside was almost entirely wiped out by the enraged Doyan Three Guards!"

Inside the live stream, the screen fell silent, then was drowned out by a cold sigh.

"That's courting death... They've turned a guard dog into a wolf that bites."

"They were greedy for that little price difference in the trade, and lost the entire Liaodong defense line. That was an incredibly shrewd deal."

Zhu Dijun took two steps back and coldly stared at the ruins of Zhenlutai, now reduced to scorched earth, on the screen.

"This bloodshed became the last straw that broke the camel's back in the loyalty of the Doyan Three Guards to the Ming Dynasty."

On the whiteboard, he forcefully drew the red circle representing the Doyan Three Guards towards the black camp next to it, which represented the Mongolian left wing.

"The Three Guards of Doyan were brought to their senses by despair. The Ming court was not only utterly corrupt, but it had also lost the will to provide them with even a meal. To survive, they had no choice. They were forced to shed their pretense of being the 'protectors of the Ming Dynasty,' and turned away, bowing their heads in utter humiliation to the newly arrived powerful forces—the Chahar and Inner Khalkha tribes of the Left Wing of Mongolia!"

"Family members, do you know what this means?"

Zhu Dijun turned around and zoomed out the holographic map, revealing the entire terrain of the Liaodong Corridor to everyone.

"With the defection and partition of the Doyan Three Guards, the Ming Dynasty's 'using barbarians to control barbarians' strategy, painstakingly cultivated in Liaodong for over a century, has completely failed! It has been wiped out!"

His finger drew a glaring red line heavily across the Liaoxi Corridor.

"The defensive line that was originally intended as a buffer zone, built with the lives of the Three Guards of Doyan, is gone! The Liaoxi Corridor of the Ming Dynasty is like a young woman stripped naked, directly exposed to the blades of the Mongol cavalry!"

"The northeastern border of the Ming Dynasty was now wide open! Not a single day of peace would ever come again!"

The studio lights dimmed instantly, leaving only a pale spotlight shining on Judy Jun's head.

He pulled up a chair and sat down, a chilling smile playing on his lips.

"Civil officials in the capital embezzled millions of yuan of military funds by falsifying accounts, while military officers on the border smashed the heads of foreigners at the horse market to steal a few taels of silver. With their hearts and minds in cahoots, they undermined the very foundation of the Ming Dynasty."

Judy leaned slightly forward, staring intently at the camera, and lowered her voice to posed a chillingly profound question.

"But do you think that with the Liaodong region wide open, only the Mongols will benefit?"

"And then there are the Japanese pirates along the southeast coast, and the civil officials of Jiangnan!"