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

The fire effects in the studio went out instantly, leaving only a cold, iron-gray light that exuded a chilling aura.

Zhu Dijun stood behind the podium and wiped the picture of the ruins of the three main halls after the fire on the whiteboard clean.

"Family, no matter how fiercely the fire burns in the Forbidden City, it cannot cover up the damned reality of rivers of blood flowing in Jiangnan!" He grabbed a black marker and wrote a name in the very center of the whiteboard with extreme violence—[Wang Zhi]!

"In the thirty-sixth year of the Jiajing reign! Just as the Yan faction, the Qingliu faction, and the eunuchs were engaged in a bloody catfight in the imperial court, our Great Ming Governor-General of Zhejiang and Zhili, Hu Zongxian, accomplished a momentous event on the southeastern front that shattered history!"

The map on the big screen instantly zoomed in on the Zhejiang coast.

"November! The Ming Dynasty's coastal defense has reached a turning point!" Zhu Dijun slammed his pointer hard on Cen Port and Taizhou on the map. "Hu Zongxian has thrown out an extremely deadly bait to Wang Zhi, the Ming Dynasty's largest maritime merchant and leader of the Japanese pirates!"

In the holographic image, Hu Zongxian stands in the commander's tent, looking at a secret letter in his hand, his eyes as cold as knives.

"That old fox Wang Zhi has been entrenched in Japan for years, commanding hundreds of warships and tens of thousands of elite Japanese pirates! A direct confrontation? Qi Jiguang and Yu Dayou haven't even fully built up their forces yet; the Ming navy simply can't compete!" Zhu Dijun roared. "What did Hu Zongxian do? He used his position as the Ming governor-general as collateral, sending someone to tell Wang Zhi—if you surrender and come ashore, the court will open the ports for trade! They might even directly appoint you as the Ming governor-general!"

The live stream chat exploded instantly.

"Holy crap! They got something for nothing!"

"Wang Zhi would believe such nonsense? He's the Pirate King!"

Zhu Dijun sneered mockingly, "People, once they climb to that position, they all want to clear their name! Wang Zhi thinks the same way! He dreams of returning home in glory, wearing the official robes of a high-ranking Ming official!"

The special effects on the big screen suddenly intensified. On the turbulent East China Sea, a massive fleet that blotted out the sky slowly approached Zhejiang.

"November! Wang Zhi, along with his trusted general Ye Zongman, swaggered into Taizhou to meet Hu Zongxian!" Zhu Dijun slammed his foot on the edge of the podium, making a deafening thud. "And what was the result?! What a load of rubbish! What opening up of trade! The moment his feet touched the ground, Hu Zongxian turned on him, and thousands of elite ambush troops swarmed in!"

In the scene, Wang Zhi's ecstatic joy froze instantly as countless gleaming embroidered spring knives and spears were firmly held against his neck.

"All's fair in war! The biggest maritime merchant of the Ming Dynasty, the ultimate mastermind behind the Japanese pirate raids, has just met his demise!" Zhu Dijun slammed his hands on the control panel. "The following year, he was formally imprisoned, and in the thirty-eighth year of the Jiajing reign, he was beheaded in a bustling marketplace in Hangzhou!"

A parallel Hongwu era of the Ming Dynasty.

Inside the Fengtian Hall, Zhu Yuanzhang slammed his hand on the dragon desk and burst into laughter, his face full of murderous intent.

"Good! What a brilliant trap!" Old Zhu's eyes, usually filled with murderous intent, flashed with a sharp light. "This scholar, Hu Zongxian, has the ruthlessness of a soldier, a founding general of our Ming Dynasty! What's the point of talking about loyalty when dealing with such a traitor who sells out his country for personal gain?! He should be lured ashore and chopped up!"

On the backdrop, the studio's cold light suddenly shifted to an extremely oppressive scarlet red.

Zhu Dijun didn't laugh; his eyes became extremely cold and sharp.

"I know that many so-called historians of later generations, when they read this part, cursed Hu Zongxian every day!" Zhu Dijun moved closer to the camera, his knuckles pounding the podium. "They said that Wang Zhi's execution led to a leaderless situation, the Japanese pirates were completely out of control, and this only exacerbated the decay in the southeast! They felt that the court should have compromised, granted Wang Zhi an official position, and opened up maritime trade!"

He suddenly grabbed an empty mineral water bottle and smashed it hard against the portrait of Wang Zhi on the big screen.

"What utter bullshit!" Zhu Dijun roared, veins bulging on his forehead. "Here, I stand with Hu Zongxian! I absolutely support killing Wang Zhi!"

"Why?! Family members, use your brains and think about what the true nature of this Jiajing-era Japanese pirate raids is?!"

He frantically drew a dense network of vested interests on the whiteboard. "It's essentially an armed uprising orchestrated by smuggling rings in the Jiangnan region! Not only are pirates like Wang Zhi involved, but also countless incredibly greedy merchants and landowners from Jiangnan!"

"Wang Zhi is the ultimate representative of these traitors! If the Ming court backs down now, pardons Wang Zhi, and even bestows upon him official titles and honors!" Zhu Dijun's voice was like a detonating dynamite, making the entire space tremble. "What would that mean?! It would undoubtedly be a declaration to the whole world—as long as your blade is sharp enough, as long as you kill enough Ming people, as long as you collude with foreign invaders and turn half of the Ming Dynasty's territory into a wasteland! The court will fear you, will pardon you, and will grant you a pardon!"

The chat in the entire live stream froze instantly, everyone was shocked by this extremely bloody logic.

"This precedent must not be set!" Zhu Dijun's eyes were bloodshot, and he gritted his teeth. "Even if Jiangnan is reduced to ruins again, even if only the last person is killed, we absolutely cannot allow these smuggling tycoons to collude with foreign enemies to hijack the national government!"

He slammed his fist on the holographic keyboard, and the image on the large screen abruptly changed. A shocking map of Liaodong's doomsday was now staring intently at everyone's retinas.

"You think this is making a mountain out of a molehill?! Look at the reigns of Wanli, Tianqi, and Chongzhen!" Zhu Dijun's eyes blazed with fury. "That's exactly what the later emperors and officials did! They kept backing down on those damn smuggling rings!"

A red laser pointer was drawing circles around Zhangjiakou and Liaodong on the map.

"Do you really think that the Buryat wild boar skin, with just tens of thousands of savages scavenging for food in the Northeast, could have single-handedly wiped out the Ming Dynasty?!" Zhu Dijun let out a chilling laugh, like that of a vengeful ghost. "Where did the Buryat wild boar skin get its endless supply of food, its excellent armor, and even its siege cannons and bows and arrows?!"

"Weren't they all smuggled goods from the Ming Dynasty, transported to the Northeast, and sold to wild boar hides for silver?!" He whirled around, staring directly at the camera. "How did the Ming Dynasty fall?! It was drained of its lifeblood by these smugglers who would sell even their own fathers for silver!"

A parallel Chongzhen era of the Ming Dynasty.

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

Zhu Youjian collapsed into the mud, and upon hearing the words "wild boar hide grain armor" and "smuggled supply," he felt as if he had been struck by lightning.

"Smuggling... Shanxi merchants..." Emperor Chongzhen's withered hands pounded the frozen mud frantically, his nails curling and bleeding. "So, what I was fighting in Liaodong wasn't the Jurchens, I was fighting for the silver of Ming Dynasty's own merchants!"

He raised his head, tears mingling with blood streaming down his face, and let out an extremely mournful roar: "I beg the officials in the capital to donate money every day, but they won't give a single penny! As a result, all of the Ming Dynasty's grain and refined iron have been secretly sent to the borderlands to raise wild boar hides! The Ming Dynasty didn't die from natural disasters, it died at the hands of these traitors who betray their own country!"

Against the backdrop of the sky, Zhu Dijun's scalpel ruthlessly harvests the festering wounds of history.

"Killing Wang Zhi was the last line of defense for the Ming Dynasty in maintaining national dignity! But the price was equally devastating."

Zhu Dijun wrote another name on the whiteboard—【Mao Haifeng】.

"After Wang Zhi was placed under house arrest, his adopted son Mao Haifeng went completely mad! Several thousand of his most elite and bloodthirsty Japanese troops retreated directly to Cen Port in Zhoushan! Relying on the extremely treacherous terrain, they held fast to the Ming Dynasty's coastal defense line!"

On the big screen, smoke billowed into the sky over Cengang, and Ming warships charged wave after wave, only to suffer heavy casualties under the firearms of the Japanese pirates.

"These desperate bandits were incredibly powerful. Qi Jiguang and Yu Dayou's land and naval forces were subsequently embroiled in a protracted war of attrition, with even the imperial court issuing several edicts reprimanding them for their ineffective suppression of the bandits!" Zhu Dijun shook his head, his voice low. "And in the summer and autumn of the same year, the Japanese pirates completely dispersed and launched a frenzied retaliation!"

The laser pointer swept across northern Jiangsu, Yangzhou, Baoying, and Tianchang.

"Large numbers of Japanese pirates landed in waves, bypassing the main defense line in eastern Zhejiang and directly penetrating into the heart of the Jianghuai region! They captured many county towns, burning, killing, and looting, leaving the Jianghuai region in ruins! This forced the Ming general Liu Xian to lead his troops in a frantic encirclement and suppression campaign by land and sea, before these beasts finally managed to loot their goods and flee by sea!"

"While Hu Zongxian's move removed the tumor from the smuggling ring, it also directly caused massive bleeding! The Ming army is almost unable to contain this boiling water!"

The red light in the studio gradually faded, turning into an extremely eerie dark yellow.

Zhu Dijun threw the pointer he was holding onto the podium, picked up a half-empty bottle of mineral water, took a sip, and looked at the lower right corner of the big screen with a cold smile.

"Family members, while the war in the southeast has brought the Ming Dynasty's finances to the brink of collapse, let's shift our focus down to the southern border of the Ming Dynasty—Guangdong."

With a light tap on the keyboard, a map of Macau in Guangdong, reeking of gold coins, suddenly appeared.

It is marked with an extremely eye-catching modern place name - [Macau]!

"In the autumn of the thirty-sixth year of Jiajing, which is 1557 AD," Zhu Dijun's lips curled into an extremely sarcastic smile, "the soldiers in the southeast were risking their lives to fill the sea, while a group of blond-haired, blue-eyed Portuguese arrived in Guangdong in large sailing ships."

On the large screen, several Western businessmen in suits and ties and a local official from Guangdong in the Ming Dynasty sat at a table, pushing over several heavy silver chests.

"How did the Portuguese do it? They didn't even use a knife! They used huge bribes to force open the mouths of the local officials in Guangdong!" Zhu Dijun spread his hands, his face full of absurdity. "These local officials not only took bribes, but they also brazenly reported to the imperial court, agreeing to the Westerners' request at an extremely low price!"

He wrote an extremely glaring number on the whiteboard—[500 taels]!

"A mere five hundred taels of land rent per year! And the Portuguese are officially permitted to settle and build houses in Macau!" Zhu Dijun laughed in fury, his laughter chilling to the bone. "Moreover, the Ming Dynasty took the money, yet they didn't even send any substantial local administrative or military forces to control the area!"

The viewers in the live stream were completely dumbfounded.

"Holy crap? Five hundred taels for a year's rent?! That's not even enough to buy a courtyard house in Beijing!"

"Is this the root cause of Macau's cession to China?!"

"Have the officials of the Ming Dynasty lost their minds? They sold off the country as a concession just to line their own pockets with bribes?!"

"These are the civil officials of the Ming Dynasty!" Zhu Dijun kicked the side of the podium, his roar deafening. "While the Japanese pirates in the southeast are still gnawing on the flesh of the Ming Dynasty, the officials in Guangdong have already started selling the blood of the Ming Dynasty! Macau has gradually become the largest trading and smuggling base and intelligence station for Westerners in the Far East!"

The parallel Yongle era of the Ming Dynasty.

Zhu Di's face turned as black as the bottom of a pot.

"Five hundred taels... to lease my Great Ming territory..." Zhu Di drew his imperial sword from his waist and chopped off a corner of the imperial desk. "These treacherous officials! When I sent Zheng He on his voyages to the Western Ocean, all nations came to pay tribute. Who dared to run wild on the coast of our Great Ming?! Zhu Houcong, you blind immortal cultivator! Jiangnan is rotten, and you even opened a breach in the gates of Lingnan!"

All the studio lights went out, leaving only a cold spotlight shining on Zhu Dijun.

He slowly turned around, looking at the two names on the whiteboard: [Mao Haifeng] and [Macau], his voice extremely low.

"Internal smuggling is rampant, external pirates are launching a fierce counterattack, and the Westerners in the south are starting to leech off the Ming Empire. The Ming Empire is rapidly sinking in this boiling ocean."