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

The studio's dim purple lights resembled a pool of dried blood, creating an oppressive atmosphere that was extremely suffocating.

Zhu Dijun stood behind the podium, his chest heaving. He grabbed a mineral water bottle from the table, took a big gulp, and then slammed the empty bottle into the wastebasket with a thud.

"Alright, family, we just finished watching how Yan Song's faction and the gentry of Jiangnan were stabbing each other in the back and squandering their inheritance."

Judy Jun placed his hands on the holographic control panel, his eyes revealing a coldness that seemed to see right through the screen.

"As the saying goes, 'Know yourself and know your enemy, and you will win every battle.' Since the officials of the Ming Dynasty have turned this country into a sieve, let's look at the problem from a different perspective!"

He slammed his hand on the control button, and the studio lights instantly turned a chilling, blood-red. The perspective on the big screen abruptly reversed, switching from a Ming Dynasty view overlooking the land of China to a pirate ship sailing through the waves, flying a skull and crossbones battle flag!

"Today, let's take the perspective of Japanese pirates and other pirate groups to see what kind of incredibly fat sheep the Ming Dynasty was around the thirty-third year of the Jiajing reign!"

On the screen, a burly man dressed in an extremely bizarre outfit—half Ming Dynasty scholar's robes and half Japanese ronin armor—was highlighted and enlarged. Beside him, two large, blood-red characters appeared: 【Xu Hai】!

"Xu Hai! He was originally a leader under Wang Zhi, but later he grew up and went solo!" Zhu Dijun grabbed a laser pointer, the red light fixed firmly on Xu Hai's portrait.

"In April, this beast led a force of twenty to thirty thousand Japanese soldiers—those from Satsuma and Osumi who couldn't survive on the Japanese islands—along with Chinese traitors forced to flee to the sea along the coast, and launched a massive invasion!"

On the holographic map, two blinding red lights suddenly burst forth from Zhelin and Chuanshawa in Songjiang.

"They directly treated the coastal lands of the Ming Dynasty as their base of operations! They stationed themselves in Zhelin and Chuanshawa, and went out to plunder and burn everywhere!"

Zhu Dijun's anger turned into a cruel laugh, a laugh as sharp as a blade scraping against glass.

"What's even more unbelievable is that Xu Hai not only robbed, but he also gave himself a shockingly ridiculous official title—the Great General Who Pacifies the Seas!"

"A damn coastal pirate leader dares to call himself the Heavenly General on Ming Dynasty territory!"

Red arrows darted across the map like venomous snakes, while alarms sounding as cities fell pierced everyone's eardrums.

"Shanghai has fallen! Nanhui has fallen! Jinshan, Qingpu, Jiading, Changshu, Kunshan, Suzhou, Tongxiang, Huzhou..." With each place name Zhu Dijun read aloud, he violently drew an X on the whiteboard.

"Tens of thousands of households outside Jiaxing City were burned to ashes! Alarms were simultaneously raised across southern Jiangsu and western Zhejiang! Most terrifyingly, the pirates' forces were now directly approaching the outskirts of Nanjing!"

A parallel Hongwu era of the Ming Dynasty.

Inside the Fengtian Hall, the deathly silence was shattered by a deafening crash that sent golden bricks crashing.

"Nanjing……"

Zhu Yuanzhang kicked over the broken imperial desk in front of him, his calloused hands clutching his chest, his eyes bloodshot and seemingly about to bleed.

"Those bastards have reached the outskirts of Nanjing?!"

That was the place where he rose to power and established the Ming Dynasty! It was the capital city where he swept away Chen Youliang and Zhang Shicheng and established his rule over the world!

"Twenty or thirty thousand pirates, treating Jiangnan like their own backyard?! And they dare call themselves Great General?!" Old Zhu drew his imperial sword and frantically hacked at the dragon-carved pillars in the hall, sending wood chips flying everywhere.

"What about our hundreds of thousands of garrison troops along the coast of our Great Ming Dynasty?! Are they all dead?! Every single official in Jiangnan, drag them out and skin them alive!"

Zhu Biao and the other young Zhus beside him all advised their father to calm down, as did Ma Xiuying. She was not having an easy time either. Nanjing was the first capital city established by the Ming Dynasty, but a hundred years later, a group of real and fake Japanese pirates defeated it at the city gate. They felt deeply ashamed.

But should we blame the garrison troops for this? Of course not, because the garrisons were all dismantled and abolished by the gentry and civil officials of Jiangnan!

On the sky, Zhu Dijun's scalpel mercilessly sliced ​​through the festering flesh of the Ming Dynasty's military defenses.

"Some people will surely ask, what are the Ming Dynasty's regular army doing? Family, don't worry, let's see how these military leaders are sending themselves to their deaths."

The timeline on the large screen jumps – [April, the defeat of CaiTaoGang].

"Faced with Xu Hai's army of over 20,000, the Ming Dynasty did not give up. Lu Tang and Commander Liu Yong, leading the Shandong troops they had transferred, ran into the Japanese pirates at Caitao Port!" Zhu Dijun slammed his pointer heavily on the words "Shandong troops."

"The Shandong men have always been known for their fighting prowess. But what was the result?! They crumbled at the first contact! A crushing defeat! Commander Liu Yong was killed on the spot, and the Shandong soldiers were routed, losing their armor and weapons, never to recover!"

The live stream chat was instantly filled with frustration and disbelief.

"A burly Shandong man can't beat a few bow-legged Japanese pirates? What a joke!"

"The soldiers are good soldiers, but how can they fight on an empty stomach with broken muskets?!"

"The commander died in battle; this was clearly a case of being dragged down by logistics and the system!"

Zhu Dijun moved closer to the camera, his knuckles pounding the podium with a loud thud.

"What if they can't win? The imperial court panicked and started bringing in wolf soldiers from remote areas!"

He forcefully wrote four large characters on the whiteboard: "[Madame Wa]".

"In May, Lady Wa, a chieftain from Guangxi in her sixties, led six thousand elite wolf soldiers on a long journey to Songjiang! This old lady was truly ruthless; upon arrival, she immediately drew her sword and fought the Japanese pirates to the death, finally achieving a minor victory!"

But then, the fervor on Zhu Dijun's face faded, replaced by a deep sorrow.

"But family, these six thousand wolf soldiers not only suffered extremely heavy casualties, but also have a terrible reputation among the people of Jiangnan! The common people even think they are more annoying than the Japanese pirates! Why?!"

Zhu Dijun slammed his fist on the control panel and roared, "Because there's no food! The Ministry of War isn't providing rations! Local officials are shirking their responsibilities and not paying the soldiers! These people have come all this way to risk their lives for your Great Ming, and you can't even give them a bowl of coarse grain porridge! What can soldiers do when they're starving? They can only rob the people themselves! A once-powerful army that could have saved the country has been turned into bandits by these civil officials' lousy logistics!"

A parallel Chongzhen era of the Ming Dynasty.

Under the old crooked tree on Coal Hill, the north wind cuts like a knife.

Upon hearing the words "no pay for the army" and "forced into becoming bandits," Zhu Youjian's withered body trembled violently, and he let out a mournful scream as he looked up at the sky.

"Logistics issues again... and unpaid wages again!"

Emperor Chongzhen's withered fingers frantically tore at his hair, blood seeping from his scalp.

"My Qin Liangyu, my He Renlong, which one of them didn't turn into a bloodthirsty warlord because of lack of money and food! The civil officials in the Ministry of Revenue and the Ministry of War that the Ming Dynasty supported have been using the strategy of cutting off their food supplies to force military generals to rebel since the Jiajing era!"

On the backdrop, the studio's blood-red lights began to flicker violently.

"With such a disgusting court and logistics system, the fact that the Ming Dynasty's southeastern coastal defenses can still hold up is entirely due to a few people risking their lives to hold the line!"

Zhu Dijun circled three other names on the whiteboard: "Yu Dayou, Lu Tang, and Ren Huan! These were some of the most capable generals of the Ming Dynasty at the time, who fought repeatedly despite defeats in the bloodshed of Jiangnan!"

On the big screen, Yu Dayou, covered in blood, stood guard at the city gate with a blunted sword; Ren Huan led the charge, fighting hand-to-hand with several hundred remaining soldiers in the mud.

"Don't they want to win? They dream of it! But they are extremely short of troops, their command is hampered by Yan's faction, and their logistics are completely rotten! These three tough guys can only act like firefighters, going wherever the fire starts, passively defending, and watching helplessly as the prosperous Jiangnan region is burned to the ground!"

Zhu Dijun turned around and casually erased all the names on the whiteboard, leaving only a huge question mark.

"Let's go back to the question we just discussed. Why did the Ming Dynasty seem like such a lucrative target to the Japanese pirates?"

He gripped the podium tightly with both hands, staring directly at the camera, speaking at a rapid pace like a machine gun:

"Because the Ming Dynasty's coastal defense system wasn't destroyed in battle, but rather it was completely dismantled by its own people long before the war!"

A tattered map of Ming Dynasty coastal defenses landed in the center of the screen.

"First, more than half of the garrison troops have deserted! The military households who should have been protecting the coastal areas with their swords have had their fields seized by powerful families, and they've been forced to become pirate guides! There isn't even a single living sentry left on the city walls!"

"Secondly, less than one-tenth of the warships remain! The invincible navy that Zheng He once commanded during his voyages to the Western Ocean can no longer even muster a few warships capable of normal navigation at sea! Why? Because the timber and funds for shipbuilding have all been embezzled by the Ministry of Works and local officials!"

"Third, and most fatally, the pirates have completely colluded with the powerful families of Jiangnan! The Yangtze River estuary, a vital gateway to the nation, is practically useless! Japanese pirate fleets are brazenly sailing into the inland waterways, while local gentry are handing them intelligence maps on the riverbanks, revealing which wealthy families are among them!"

Zhu Dijun took a step back, half of his face hidden in the dark red light, his voice as cold as a poisoned ice spike.

"From a pirate's perspective, what do they see? An extremely wealthy, open-air vault overflowing with silk and silver, yet without a single door or lock! The funniest part is that the vault's owners are fighting amongst themselves inside, even handing knives to the robbers!"

The studio alarm gradually subsided, replaced by an extremely heavy, heart-pounding war drumbeat.

"In the thirty-third year of the Jiajing reign, the southeast of the Ming Dynasty was rotten to the point that not even a bone fragment remained. The Japanese pirates laughed wildly, the Yan faction counted their money, and millions of people in Jiangnan wailed in pools of blood."

Suddenly, a terrifying, raging fire, seemingly capable of starting a wildfire, ignited in Zhu Dijun's eyes.

He suddenly grabbed a handful of red markers.

"All of the Ming Dynasty's conventional forces have been wiped out. From this land soaked in blood, only an extremely monstrous ultimate killing machine could be forced out."

The red pen in Zhu Dijun's hand hovered heavily above the whiteboard.

"No logistics? Fine, I'll raise the money myself! The garrison soldiers can't fight? Fine, I'll recruit them myself!"

He lowered his voice, each word carrying a chilling, murderous aura.

"When this man was in Yiwu, Zhejiang, facing a group of unruly people fighting tooth and nail over an iron ore mine, the strongest and most brutal private heavy infantry regiment of the Ming Dynasty was about to see the light of day again."