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

In the studio, the oppressive alarm had subsided. But the lights didn't return to their original brightness; instead, they cast an extremely somber, dark golden hue, reminiscent of the waning days and deathly stillness of the late Ming Dynasty.

Zhu Dijun stood behind the podium, tapping the table with his pointer intermittently, the dull sound like a countdown clock.

"Family members, as we just discussed, the smuggling tycoons and the treacherous officials like Yan Song colluded to sabotage the horse market in the thirtieth year of the Jiajing reign. Anda Khan was furious, the flames of war reignited, and the Xuanda defense line was thrown into chaos once again."

Zhu Dijun raised his head, his eyes extremely cold.

"What are we really fighting in this war? To put it bluntly, it's all about spending money!"

He slammed his hand on the holographic keyboard, and a model of an empty ancient treasury crashed onto the large screen, with several virtual rats scurrying about in the empty granary.

"The Ming Dynasty's treasury has long been emptied beyond recognition by the smuggling rings in Jiangnan and corrupt officials like Yan Song. Tens of thousands of mouths at the front are waiting to be fed, gunpowder needs to be bought, and weapons need to be manufactured. How will this hole be filled?"

Zhu Dijun pointed to the disadvantaged groups throughout Chinese dynasties.

"What do you do when you're broke? Rob! But who do you rob? These big shots sitting on the dragon throne and in the imperial court have their eyes fixed on the most honest and easiest-to-bully group of people in the world—the common people of the Ming Dynasty!"

On the large screen, three blood-red characters crashed down with extreme ferocity—【京料银】!

"In the first month of the thirtieth year of the Jiajing reign! In order to raise funds for the war in the nine border regions, the Ministry of Revenue of the Ming Dynasty issued a direct order to more than a dozen provinces across the country—to forcibly apportion the amount of silver levied on the capital!"

Zhu Dijun grabbed a red marker and drew a huge vortex on the whiteboard, with an arrow pointing directly at the center of the vortex.

"What is 'Beijing Liao Yin'? It's a war protection fee that the imperial court forcibly imposes on you on top of the regular taxes!"

The red laser pointer moved wildly across the holographic map.

"How ruthless were these bureaucrats? They not only imposed quotas on areas close to the battlefield like Beizhili, Henan, and Shandong, but they even targeted Yunnan Province, a remote and economically underdeveloped region with extremely poor transportation at the time!"

Zhu Dijun slammed his hand on the southwest corner of the map. "Yunnan! The Ministry of Revenue has directly imposed a quota of 57,340 taels on it! Local officials are like mad dogs, rushing into people's homes to rob them of grain and money in order to meet this quota!"

A parallel Chongzhen era of the Ming Dynasty.

Coal Hill, under the old crooked-necked tree.

Zhu Youjian stared intently at the three large, blood-red characters on the sky, his entire body trembling violently as if struck by lightning. A trickle of crimson blood seeped from his bitten lip, dripping down his chin onto his tattered dragon robe.

"Assignment...it's assignment again..."

Zhu Youjian frantically pounded the ground with his withered hands, letting out a mournful, bloodcurdling laugh.

"Isn't this just my Liaodong tax, military training tax, and suppression tax?! It turns out that back in the Jiajing era, these damned civil officials had already mastered the art of imposing exorbitant taxes!"

He recalled his seventeen years on the throne, during which each time he issued an edict of apportionment, his ministers would confidently promise to solve the urgent problems at the front. But what was the result? The battles at the front only worsened, and the bandits only multiplied!

On the sky, Zhu Dijun's scalpel precisely cut into the most insidious heart of this quota system.

"Family members, do you really think that this levy of tens of thousands of taels of silver is to be shared equally by everyone in the province? Wrong! Utterly wrong!"

Judy Jun slammed his hands on the podium, his anger turning into a mocking laugh. "Let's look at the real local archives!"

On the large screen, a fragment of a local gazetteer from Chengcheng County, Shaanxi Province, during the Ming Dynasty appeared. A line of yellowed calligraphy was highlighted and enlarged.

The poor have no land to even place a stake, yet they receive compensation from many others.

Zhu Dijun pointed to this line of text, his voice carrying a chilling undertone:

"Do you see that? The poor don't even own a single plot of land, yet they have to pay several times more in taxes than others! Why? Because the local gentry, landlords, and smuggling ring's protectors have connections everywhere! They've filled the county magistrate's pockets with silver, concealing and transferring hundreds or even thousands of acres of fertile land under their own names into the accounts of the poor!"

The live stream chat instantly erupted in a suffocating outrage.

"Legal robbery! The poor have no land but have to pay ten times the taxes, how are they supposed to live?!"

"The powerful collude with the government to shift all the pressure from above onto the lower classes—how come this script hasn't changed in hundreds of years!"

"This is the ultimate formula for oppression leading to popular rebellion!"

"What if you can't pay taxes? Sell your children! What if you sell your children? Flee the famine! Escape your hometown overnight, become vagrants, become refugees!"

Zhu Dijun lashed his pointer heavily onto the map of Chengcheng County.

"Family members, remember this Chengcheng County in Shaanxi! This is the place where, decades later, Wang Er, the leader of the peasant uprising at the end of the Ming Dynasty, first raised his sword! The death knell of the Ming Dynasty did not toll during the Chongzhen era, but was already cast when those corrupt officials forcibly levied silver from the capital during the Jiajing era!"

A parallel Hongwu era of the Ming Dynasty.

Inside the Fengtian Hall.

Zhu Yuanzhang suddenly stood up and kicked over the bronze charcoal stove in front of him, scattering red-hot charcoal all over the ground.

"The poor have no land to stand on, yet they suffer many extra losses..." Zhu Yuanzhang stared at the line of words on the sky with bloodshot eyes, his whole body exuding a terrifying killing intent.

"We established the Yellow Register and the Fish Scale Register precisely to prevent these local gentry and wealthy landowners from concealing their land holdings! These officials actually dare to collude with the powerful and wealthy, placing all the taxes on the landless people!"

Old Zhu drew his sword and began frantically hacking at the dragon-carved pillars inside the hall, sending wood chips flying everywhere.

"Kill! Send an order to the Embroidered Uniform Guard to investigate every county magistrate in the Ming Dynasty! Anyone found to be colluding with local tyrants to conceal land ownership should be skinned alive and their entire family, including nine generations of relatives, executed! We will use the skins of these beasts to pave a path to survival for the poor people of the world!"

The studio camera suddenly switched to a different view.

Amidst the tragic scenes of people across the world selling their children and becoming homeless, several extremely abrupt and even somewhat darkly humorous images suddenly popped up on the big screen.

The gates of several magnificent palaces burst open, and chests of silver and tall horses were driven out by eunuchs and palace guards, and sent to the capital in a grand procession.

"Family members, in the thirtieth year of the Jiajing reign, when the people are suffering and the Ming Dynasty's finances have completely collapsed, an extremely surreal comedy has unfolded in the imperial court!"

Zhu Dijun forcefully wrote several royal titles on the whiteboard: [King Dai, King Ru, King De].

"In April, the fattest and most bloodsucking parasites of the Ming Dynasty—the regional princes—actually donated money to the imperial court!"

Zhu Dijun let out a deafening laugh, "They all submitted memorials to the Jiajing Emperor, offering silver and warhorses, claiming it was to help pay the border troops!"

The live stream chat was flooded with question marks; many viewers were bewildered. Why were these princes, whom the Zhu family had treated like pigs, suddenly being plucked?

"You really think these feudal lords have had a change of heart? That they're concerned about the country and its people? Bullshit!"

Zhu Dijun suddenly slapped his thigh.

"Why are they donating money? Because they're afraid of dying! The Xuanda defense line has been riddled with holes, and Altan Khan's cavalry could storm into the interior at any moment. The princes' mansions are located in important northern towns; once the cities fall, the first to have their homes ransacked by the Mongols will be these incredibly wealthy princes!"

Zhu Dijun zoomed in on the camera, his face full of disdain:

"They have millions, even tens of millions, of taels of silver in their pockets, and now they're donating a few thousand or tens of thousands of taels to the imperial court. What do you call that? That's called paying to avoid disaster! That's called paying protection money to the Jiajing Emperor!"

The parallel Yongle era of the Ming Dynasty.

Zhu Di looked at the several princes in the sky who were offering silver, and the disgust in his eyes was almost overflowing.

"A bunch of cowards."

Zhu Di coldly uttered four words.

"The princes of the Ming Dynasty were supposed to be frontier kings, defending the country's borders and leading armies to quell rebellions! But by the Jiajing era, they had become nothing more than fat pigs, confined to their palaces, buying their way out with money. What use are such useless people? They might as well be abolished!"

Zhu Di knew better than anyone that these vassal kings had long been the most fatal cancer on the Ming Dynasty. They occupied the best lands in the land, paid no taxes or performed no corvée labor, and still received huge sums of money from the court every year. Now that disaster was imminent, their donation of this small amount of silver was simply a drop in the ocean.

On the sky, Zhu Dijun's analysis reached its coldest point.

"By the end of the thirtieth year of the Jiajing reign, the court saw that there were too many refugees fleeing from below and feared that it might really incite a peasant uprising. So, the Jiajing Emperor issued a fake imperial edict to exempt disaster-stricken areas such as the two capitals, Henan, Guizhou, and Shanxi from taxes and grain."

Zhu Dijun casually dragged the virtual imperial edict into the wastepaper basket.

"Tax exemption? This imperial edict is just a piece of waste paper when it reaches the local level! Why? Because the local government had already used boards and shackles to rob the poor of their last grain of food for the winter when they were allocating rations at the beginning of the year!"

Zhu Dijun roared out.

"This tax exemption only exempts the wealthy landowners from paying the difference they haven't had time to pay! The poor have long since been ruined and their families destroyed. This policy is only saving the rich who are profiting from people's suffering!"

The studio lights went completely dark, leaving only a spotlight shining on Zhu Dijun's cold profile.

"In the thirtieth year of the Jiajing reign, the Ming Dynasty was completely trapped in an irreversible death spiral. Smuggling rings became increasingly wealthy, princes paid to buy their way out of trouble, and ordinary people were reduced to vagrants under the levies imposed on them."

Zhu Dijun lowered his voice and threw out a chilling question.

"The national treasury is completely empty, but Altan Khan in the north hasn't stopped, and the Japanese pirates along the southeast coast have been thoroughly fattened by smuggling rings. When these two devastating storms simultaneously crash down on the Ming Dynasty, who will the Jiajing Emperor, who is hiding in the Western Garden practicing alchemy and cultivating immortality, drag out as a scapegoat?"