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

The virtual alarm in the studio was still blaring mournfully.

On the big screen, an English steamship belching black smoke crashed through the edge of the image, its dark cannons pointed dead at the tattered fig leaf of the Qing Dynasty.

"Family members, when the Western Industrial Revolution was already holding guns to their heads, what was our Qing Dynasty emperor doing?"

Zhu Dijun kicked the edge of the podium, making an extremely violent and loud noise.

"They are contributing the most absurd and disgusting hellish joke to Chinese history with their lives!"

The holographic screen suddenly switched.

A portrait of a Qing Dynasty emperor with a withered face, unfocused eyes, and emaciated frame appears in the center of the screen, accompanied by an extremely pungent virtual opium smoke.

"This old man, Deng, is the son of Daoguang, and later the Xianfeng Emperor of the Qing Dynasty!"

Judy grabbed the pointer and slapped it across the listless face.

"The Anglo-French allied forces have already reached Tongzhou, and their cannonballs are even hitting the walls of the Forbidden City! What's this guy doing? He's in the Yuanmingyuan, with a beautiful woman from Jiangnan on his left arm and an opium pipe in his right, smoking opium like a madman every day!"

Zhu Dijun slammed his hands on the podium, his anger turning into a bitter laugh: "When the Anglo-French allied forces breached the city, what earth-shattering thing did our Qing emperor do? He ran! He took his wife, children, palace maids, and eunuchs and fled overnight to the Chengde Mountain Resort! What did the common people say about him? 'The emperor is number one at running away, abandoning both his empire and his beloved!'"

The live stream chat was instantly flooded with the words "Runaway God".

"What a disgrace! Our ancestors were still hunting wild boars in the Northeast, and this bastard doesn't even dare to stay in Beijing!"

"If you can't win, run away. After you're done running, just keep smoking opium in Chengde until you die! Is this the tragic emperor in the official history of the Qing Dynasty?"

A parallel Chongzhen era of the Ming Dynasty.

Under the old crooked-necked tree on Coal Hill.

Zhu Youjian stared intently at the sky, a trickle of bright red blood seeping from his bitten lip.

"Escape... The emperor guards the nation's gates, the monarch dies for the state!"

Zhu Youjian's voice was as mournful as a night owl weeping blood, "Even if there wasn't a single tael of silver in the imperial granary, even if only the eunuch Wang Chengen remained by my side, I would never retreat a single step! These barbarians of the Great Qing, occupying such a beautiful land, were actually frightened into abandoning the capital and fleeing by mere red-haired devils?!"

Emperor Chongzhen abruptly threw the imperial sword to the ground and cried out in anguish to the heavens:

"How could such a shameless coward, who has disgraced his ancestors, have been able to usurp the divine artifact for two hundred years! How unjust is Heaven!"

On the sky, Judy Jun's cold laughter seemed to pierce through time and space.

"Emperor Xianfeng fled and died from opium addiction. Did he think that was the end of the road? How naive!"

Zhu Dijun pressed a key on the holographic keyboard, and a portrait of a young Qing Dynasty emperor popped up.

"His son, the Tongzhi Emperor, utterly slapped the lowest line on the Qing Dynasty emperors, plunging them into the depths of the latrines of the Eight Great Hutongs!"

Zhu Dijun suddenly turned around and forcefully wrote three bloody characters on the whiteboard: "Vegetative State Disease"!

"In the official history compiled by the Qing Dynasty itself, in an attempt to save face for this unfortunate child, they said he died of smallpox. But in unofficial histories and in the hutongs of Beijing at the time, this was a huge, widely known joke!"

Zhu Dijun roared out.

"The emperor of the Qing Dynasty didn't love his three thousand concubines; he found them too dull. Every night, dressed in plain clothes and accompanied by eunuchs, he would sneak out of the Forbidden City to visit brothels!"

The studio lights instantly turned an extremely decadent pink.

"The emperor, a man of immense power, was caught engaging in VIP sex in the brothels of Beijing! In the end, he literally developed syphilis, his body festered, and he died oozing pus!"

Zhu Dijun slapped his forehead. "This is the chieftain of the Qing Dynasty! The common people laugh so hard they can't stand up straight: The emperor is truly a man of character, preferring prostitutes to imperial beauties, and he died young because of a woman's belly!"

The parallel Yongle era of the Ming Dynasty.

Zhu Di sat upright on the dragon throne, his expression having changed from anger to extreme disgust, as if he had seen a huge, stinking pile of dog excrement.

"Died from an illness contracted in a brothel?"

Zhu Di shook his head, his eyes filled with cold disdain. "Barbarians are barbarians after all. The bestiality in their bones can't be hidden even in a dragon robe. If such lowly creatures were born in my Ming Dynasty, I wouldn't even need to lift a finger; the Imperial Clan Court's prison would be their best destination!"

"Family members, do you think the Tongzhi Emperor was explosive enough? No! He was just the trigger!"

Zhu Dijun casually tore off the writing on the whiteboard, and the pink light on the screen was suddenly replaced by an extremely eerie dark purple.

A portrait of an old woman from the Qing Dynasty, covered in makeup and with a sinister look in her eyes, occupies the entire screen like a vengeful ghost exuding the stench of death!

"The one who truly turned modern history into an absurd tragicomedy and took historical nihilism to its extreme was this peerless old witch who rose to power by stepping on the puppet emperors Tongzhi and Guangxu—Empress Dowager Cixi!"

Zhu Dijun grabbed a stack of fictitious bills and slammed them hard into Cixi's face.

"In the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895, the Qing Dynasty's navy was completely annihilated. Why couldn't they win? Because the shells fired by the Beiyang Fleet were filled with nothing but sand!" Zhu Dijun's forehead veins bulged, and his roar was deafening.

"Where's the money?! The money meant for buying artillery shells was all misappropriated by that old hag to renovate her Summer Palace! The people, pointing at her back, cursed her with the famous line: 'The Empress Dowager renovates the garden, the country pays for it!'"

The live stream chat was instantly ignited, with anger erupting as if it were real.

"She's risking the lives of soldiers on the front lines to build an amusement park! How come this old hag doesn't die?!"

"Naval spending turned into stones; it would be an injustice if the Qing Dynasty didn't perish!"

"Misappropriating military funds wasn't enough; this old lady can pull off even more ridiculous moves."

Zhu Dijun moved closer to the camera, a chilling smile curving his lips.

"She felt that the foreigners were bullying her and interfering with her power. So, in the year of Gengzi (1900), this old lady acted rashly and issued an edict—declaring war on all nations!"

On the large screen, an imperial edict declaring war on eleven major powers, including Britain, the United States, France, and Russia, was highlighted and enlarged.

"Isn't that awesome? Isn't that powerful?"

Zhu Dijun let out a wild laugh that seemed to lift the roof off the city. "The common people were completely dumbfounded: The old lady has gone mad! What does she have to fight the whole world with? The birdcages in the hands of the Eight Banners soldiers?! And what happened? As soon as the Eight-Nation Alliance entered the city, this old hag who had just been so domineering in declaring war ran away even faster than Emperor Xianfeng!"

The pointer in Zhu Dijun's hand danced wildly in the air:

"On her westward escape, the pampered Empress Dowager was so hungry she ate sweet potatoes and cornbread like a beggar. After the foreigners left and she signed the Boxer Protocol, selling out the interests of all of China, she returned to Beijing to continue her idyllic life!"

A huge model of a dining table crashed onto the center of the screen.

"After returning to the palace, she demanded a hundred dishes for each meal! She'd eat a couple of bites and then have them taken away and thrown away!" Judy Jun stared intently at the camera.

"The money she wastes on one meal is more than the daily military expenses for fighting on the front lines! This is what the Empress Dowager of the Qing Dynasty is like! This is what it means to 'prefer friendly nations to domestic slaves'!"

A parallel Hongwu era of the Ming Dynasty.

Zhu Yuanzhang stared intently at the display of a hundred dishes on the sky, his chest heaving like a bellows being pulled at full capacity.

"One hundred dishes...eat two bites and throw them away..." Old Zhu's calloused hands forcefully broke off a piece of wood from the edge of the imperial desk.

"Our Great Ming Dynasty has just established itself, and we eat nothing but vegetables and tofu every day! When Empress Ma makes us a big pancake, we lick every last crumb clean! This old hag is wasting the people's hard-earned money on food like this!"

"Someone! Draw a portrait of this old hag! Post it at the execution ground in Jinling City!"

Zhu Yuanzhang's eyes were bloodshot, and his murderous aura was overwhelming.

"Let the people of the world see! If such a peerless prodigy falls into our hands, we will skin her alive, stuff her with straw, and subject her to three thousand six hundred cuts!"

On the sky, Zhu Dijun casually cut away the portrait of Empress Dowager Cixi.

The studio lights gradually dimmed, leaving only a pale spotlight shining on the corner of the big screen.

There, huddled up, was a meek and submissive young emperor of the Qing Dynasty—the Guangxu Emperor.

"Under the tyranny of Empress Dowager Cixi, Emperor Guangxu was a complete joke of hell."

There was no sympathy in Judy Jun's voice, only deep mockery.

"He wanted to implement reforms, but the old woman (his mother) put him under house arrest in Yingtai. What did people joke about him? The mighty emperor of the Qing Dynasty didn't even have the right to leave the Forbidden City; he lived a life less free than the common people selling tea in the alleyways!"

The scene shifts again. Emperor Guangxu exits, and a young child dressed in a Manchu dragon robe stands in an extremely dilapidated hall of the Forbidden City.

The last emperor, Puyi.

"The Qing Dynasty has fallen, and the Xuantong Emperor has abdicated. But this century-old absurd farce is still forcibly prolonging its life within the high walls of the Forbidden City."

Zhu Dijun sneered as he pressed down on an extremely ridiculous piece of unofficial historical material.

"What was Puyi doing in this isolated city surrounded by the flames of revolution? He was playing pranks! Bored, he made the eunuchs kneel in a row and stuffed mustard into their mouths! Watching the eunuchs writhe in tears from the spiciness, this deposed emperor laughed uproariously on his dragon throne!"

Zhu Dijun slammed his fist on the podium.

"Outside, it's already the Republic of China! They've cut off their queues! They're moving towards a republic! But inside this palace, the last vestiges of the Buryat wild boar skin are still playing house behind closed doors!"

The chat in the live stream suddenly fell silent for a moment, then erupted into a cathartic outpouring of intense sorrow and cathartic release.

"This isn't history, this is a massive immersive murder mystery game!"

"Even after the country has fallen, they're still stuffing mustard into their mouths. The Qing Dynasty was truly a concentration camp of lunatics!"

"Three hundred years of blood debt, and it all ended up in such a ridiculous mess!"

Zhu Dijun slowly straightened up and straightened his disheveled shirt collar.

The studio lights came back on, and all the funny background music and comical filters were completely shattered by the cold, deathly silence at that moment.

"I've finished telling the jokes about those bizarre emperors of the Qing Dynasty. But that's with me toning it down; the truth was far more brutal."

Judy Jun's eyes were like a bloodstained, sharp boning knife, so cold it could freeze the soul.

"They were praised to the skies in the official history of the Qing Dynasty, but were stripped bare in unofficial histories. But after we laughed, we looked at this war-torn land of China, at the unequal treaties that humiliated and ceded national sovereignty... and at the cruel historical truth hidden behind them, such as the use of Mongolian and Han medicine."

Zhu Dijun moved closer to the camera, his voice extremely suppressed.

"Let's return to the Jiajing era. Everyone knows that a large dynasty cannot be destroyed by external attacks; only internal corruption and collapse, coupled with collusion with foreign enemies, can lead to its demise!"