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

[Modern Live Streaming Room]

The dense barrage of golden bullets almost burst the holographic screen.

"Qi Family Army marches forth! Not a blade of grass will remain!"

"The God of War has arrived! Finally, we can hold our heads high!"

"Quickly, quickly, I want to see how Qi Jiguang uses the Mandarin Duck Formation to utterly crush these pirates!"

Seeing the fervent anticipation on the screen, Zhu Dijun felt no elation. He casually grabbed the pointer from the podium and slammed it hard onto the control panel, producing a piercing crack.

"Wake up, everyone!" Judy Jun's voice was like a bucket of ice water poured over your heads. "Have you been reading too many novels? Did you really think this was some kind of mindless, wish-fulfillment story where you just sweep through everything?!"

The warm red lights that had just been turned on in the studio were kicked into an extremely oppressive dark gray by him.

"Qi Jiguang's army could instantly turn the tide? Bullshit!" Zhu Dijun slammed his hands on the podium, staring intently at the camera. "I'll emphasize again, reality isn't a wish-fulfillment story! The Ming Dynasty's economic system and people's livelihood have been utterly and completely turned into a death trap!"

A red laser pointer drew a glaring bloodstain on the map.

"The southeastern region plagued by Japanese pirates has seen the seven most important financial centers of the Ming Dynasty—Suzhou, Songjiang, Changzhou, Zhenjiang, Hangzhou, Jiaxing, and Huzhou—plundered year after year! Seven or eight out of ten villages and towns have been destroyed, and more than half of the farmland has been abandoned! The imperial court had no choice but to order a two-year tax exemption for the southeast!"

"Does tax exemption even matter? The common people have lost their lives, and the land has become scorched earth overgrown with weeds! The national treasury can't collect a single penny, while military expenses at the front are skyrocketing! The salt fields were burned to the ground by pirates, and the Ming Dynasty's most important salt tax has been completely cut off!"

The screen then cut to a tragic scene of the Grand Canal.

"What's worse is that the Grand Canal has been disrupted! Grain from the south simply can't reach the capital! Grain prices in Beijing are skyrocketing! Officials can't even get their salaries paid, and even the Jiajing Emperor, who was practicing immortality in the Western Garden, didn't have money to buy spices!"

Zhu Dijun lowered his voice, each word carrying a chilling edge: "You think this is the end of the world? Wrong. Beyond this devastating southeastern coast, Heaven thinks the Ming Dynasty hasn't suffered enough."

The holographic screen suddenly shook violently, and the entire studio floor seemed to tremble along with it.

Four terrifying black characters slammed onto the center of the screen—【Jiajing Great Earthquake】!

"The twelfth month of the thirty-fourth year of Jiajing (1556), the day of Renyin! That is, January 23, 1!" Zhu Dijun grabbed a black marker and wrote down an extremely exaggerated number on the whiteboard with all his might. "In this catastrophe known in history as the 'Great Earthquake of Huaxian,' Heaven issued the final death sentence to the Ming Dynasty!"

The map on the screen instantly shifted from the southeast coast to the northwest. Shaanxi, Shanxi, Henan, Gansu—the entire crust of Northwest China seemed to be torn apart by an invisible giant hand.

"The epicenter is in Huaxian County, Shaanxi! The magnitude is a staggering 8, even 8.3! The intensity reached an incredible 11 degrees!" Zhu Dijun roared, veins bulging on his forehead. "The earth is cracking and springs are gushing, cities are sinking! Mount Hua is mourning, and the Wei River is overflowing!"

He moved closer to the camera, his knuckles clapping loudly against the podium.

"Family members, our historical records contain many accounts of deaths caused by natural disasters. But this time, it is absolutely the most devastating catastrophe in human history! The data compiled by the Ming Dynasty's Emperor Shizong and the People's Daily later clearly state that this earthquake affected 97 prefectures and counties!"

"The death toll: 830,000!"

Zhu Dijun kicked the side of the podium hard: "830,000 people! This isn't just casualties, this is the population that vanished without a trace, the registered population that simply disappeared! This is the Ming Dynasty! 830,000 people died instantly, the entire Northwest's economy was completely paralyzed, turning it into a desolate wasteland!"

A parallel Chongzhen era of the Ming Dynasty.

Under the old crooked tree on Coal Hill, Zhu Youjian heard the words "Northwest paralyzed" and "830,000," and he felt as if he had been struck by lightning, collapsing into the cold mud.

"Natural disaster in the Northwest... It's the Northwest again..." Chongzhen frantically pounded the ground with his withered hands, his nails curling and bleeding, and a miserable laugh like that of a vengeful ghost came from his throat.

His Ming Dynasty was completely dragged down by the years of drought and refugees in the Northwest! Li Zicheng and Zhang Xianzhong were both bandits who fought their way out of the famine in the Northwest!

"So the dragon vein of the Northwest was severed as early as the Jiajing era!" Emperor Chongzhen looked up at the sky, tears mingling with blood streaming down his face. "Emperor Jiajing! What kind of empire did you leave your descendants? The south was ravaged by pirates, and the north was torn to pieces by natural disasters! This Ming Dynasty is simply a hellish battlefield from which there is no escape!"

The story takes place in a parallel timeline of the 34th year of the Jiajing reign in the Ming Dynasty.

West Garden.

Having just finished his ritual and dressed in a luxurious Taoist robe, Emperor Jiajing, Zhu Houcong, stared intently at the "830,000 deaths" sign on the sky. The jade ruyi in his hand fell onto the gold bricks and shattered into pieces.

"Eight hundred and thirty thousand... Heaven is warning us..." Jiajing's face, which was usually unfathomable, was now completely distorted.

He considered himself a celestial being, seeking immortality and cultivating Taoist temples, believing he could communicate with heaven and earth. But fate dealt him a resounding slap in the face, the most powerful in human history.

Isn't this God pointing his finger at him and calling him a tyrant for all time?!

Yan Song and Yan Shifan below were already terrified, lying prostrate on the ground, trembling like leaves. With no money in the southeast and a complete crop failure in the northwest, even these notorious corrupt officials, who were known for their ruthless exploitation, felt there was no way to salvage the Ming Dynasty's mess!

On the sky, Zhu Dijun's scalpel ruthlessly cut away the last fig leaf of the Ming Dynasty.

"The Southeast is collapsing! The Northwest is suffering a catastrophe!" Zhu Dijun drew a huge knot on the whiteboard. "The country is facing this desperate situation of destruction on two fronts, and what are those Jiangnan gentry, powerful families, and bureaucrats who are all well-versed in the Four Books and Five Classics doing? They're fucking squandering their inheritance!"

The red laser pointer was frantically marking crosses on the map.

"Under the great disaster, land annexation not only did not stop, but reached its historical peak! Those bastards in Zhejiang, Southern Zhili, Fujian, and Guangdong took advantage of the people's displacement to frantically seize polder fields, sandy fields, military farmland, and mudflats!"

"Millions of landless peasants were reduced to utter refugees. With no food to eat and their land seized, what other way out did they have besides jumping into the sea to become henchmen of the Japanese pirates? No!"

Zhu Dijun slammed his hands on the podium, his eyes bloodshot as he stared directly at the camera: "This is exactly why the number of Japanese pirates along the Ming Dynasty's coast keeps increasing despite our efforts to suppress them! Because the pirates' manpower comes from the millions of ordinary people forced into rebellion by the Ming Dynasty's own system! And what about those gentry and powerful families? They not only seize land, but also continue to smuggle goods and supplies to the pirates at sea, even actively acting as their guides!"

"Colluding with outsiders and plundering everything! This isn't a war against external forces; it's an extremely bloodthirsty internal massacre!"

The chat in the live stream fell into an extremely oppressive silence.

A few dozen seconds later, a dense barrage of comments, filled with extreme frustration and anger, completely flooded the screen.

"Damn it! I'm crying! What did these people do wrong to be born into this cannibalistic era!"

["I'm reminded of the War of Resistance Against Japan... This moment is just like that moment! Both times, foreign enemies invaded, traitors led the way, and ordinary people sacrificed their lives to fill the pits!"]

"But during the War of Resistance against Japan, we had teachers! We had countless heroes who sacrificed their lives to awaken the nation! What did these common people of the Jiajing era have?!"

Seeing this comment, Zhu Dijun's eyes turned red.

"That's right! Family, you've hit the nail on the head!" Zhu Dijun's voice was extremely hoarse, carrying a desolate sorrow that pierced the heavens. "Although the modern war of resistance was brutal, we had faith! We had leaders! We had a special hope!"

He pointed to the Ming Dynasty refugees wailing amidst the flames of war and ruins on the big screen.

"But what did the people of the Jiajing era have?! The emperor was practicing alchemy in pursuit of immortality, the cabinet was scheming to seize power, local officials were embezzling disaster relief funds, and the wealthy gentry of Jiangnan were colluding with pirates to seize their land!"

"There is no hope! Only endless despair! In this state apparatus, from top to bottom, not a single person treats the poor at the bottom as human beings!"

The dim gray lights in the studio gradually went out, leaving only an extremely cold spotlight shining on Zhu Dijun's tall figure.

"The southeast has fallen, the northwest is a wasteland, and most of China is burning fiercely. The death knell of history has already tolled on the skull of the Ming Dynasty."

Zhu Dijun slowly turned around, pointing the black marker in his hand to the only name still faintly lit on the whiteboard—[Qi Jiguang].

"Reality is definitely not a wish-fulfillment story."

He lowered his voice, each word like a battle blade tempered in a raging fire.

"But it was precisely because of this boundless despair, because all the paths of the Ming Dynasty had been completely cut off."

"That young man in his twenties, that general whose heart bled as he watched the regular army rout, was the one who had to smash the rotten pot of the old system in this hell on earth, carving out a path to survival for the millions of people at the bottom who had been driven to the brink of death!"

In the background of the studio, a series of extremely heavy marching footsteps, like thunder crushing everything in their path, pierced through the dust of hundreds of years of history and exploded with a deafening roar.