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

The studio lights turned a somber, dark red, like congealed blood.

"The lives of ordinary people were sacrificed, but did the defenses of Xuanda hold?"

Judy grabbed a half-empty bottle of mineral water, unscrewed it, and took a big gulp. The icy water suppressed the burning sensation in his throat.

"Protect my ass! This is a vicious cycle!"

He smashed the empty water bottle into the trash can and strode back to the holographic screen.

"The relieving of the siege of Datong Right Guard came at an extremely heavy cost for the Ming army. Jiang Chengxun, the deputy commander of Yongping, and a host of other mid- to low-ranking military officers fought valiantly and died for their country. The lower-ranking officers risked their lives, and what were their superiors doing? They should be dismissed and investigated!"

A string of official reports from the Ministry of War of the Ming Dynasty crashed onto the screen.

"Several generals and governors were demoted or dismissed for failing to defend the border. Soldiers' monthly rations were chronically delayed; while the border troops risked their lives on the city walls, their wives and children went hungry at home. The result? Morale plummeted, and desertion among border soldiers increased exponentially! Being a soldier was worse than being a refugee; wielding a knife was worse than being a bandit!"

Zhu Dijun crossed his arms and looked coldly at the camera: "The Ming Dynasty's military system was rotten to the core, but merely rotten doesn't mean the Mongols could come and go as freely as if it were their own backyard. The real fatal blow came from internal betrayal."

The holographic keyboard was being pounded away, and several strange figures appeared on the big screen, all with distinctive late Qing Dynasty hairstyles but dressed in Ming Dynasty clothing.

"We've mentioned before the smuggling and escorting of border merchants. But those merchants were only after money. Today, I'm going to expose the most disgusting and insidious group of traitors in the history of border defense during the Jiajing reign—Han Chinese rebels!"

He wrote two names on the whiteboard with such force that he almost tore the surface.

【Zhao Quan】, 【Qiu Fu】!

"Who are these people? Members of the White Lotus sect! Refugees and fugitives from the Ming Dynasty! They fled beyond the Great Wall and sought refuge with Altan Khan!"

Zhu Dijun pointed his pointer at the reconstruction of Ban Shengcheng on the screen.

"What is the greatest weakness of nomadic peoples? They don't know how to build fortifications, how to construct complex siege weapons, and they don't understand military strategy. These traitors went over and taught them everything they knew!"

The images on the large screen were exhilarating. On the vast grasslands, Han-style cities rose from the ground. Han blacksmiths worked day and night to produce siege ladders and battering rams.

"Zhao Quan and his gang built Bansheng City for Anda on Fengzhou Beach! They acted as strategists for the Mongols, drawing up maps of the Ming Dynasty's nine border defense lines, pointing out where the walls were weak and where the garrisons were sparse. This was practically the headquarters of a puppet army in the mid-Ming Dynasty!"

The chat in the live stream exploded instantly.

"You can guard against traitors day and night, but it's hard to guard against traitors within your own ranks! Traitors have a truly long and deep-rooted history!"

"So that's why the Mongols suddenly learned how to fight positional battles! It turns out these bastards taught them!"

"These two are even worse than smugglers. Smugglers want money, but they're threatening the life of the Ming Dynasty!"

"The most ingenious part is yet to come. The Ming court's subtle manipulation of these traitors is enough to make anyone have a stroke!"

Zhu Dijun, with an absurd expression, pulled up a piece of historical material—the Taosongzhai Incident.

"In the thirty-seventh year of the Jiajing reign, a negotiation took place between the Ming Dynasty and the Tatars. The Ming army captured a traitorous general from the Mongol side named Taosongzhai. Altan Khan took this very seriously and sent envoys to negotiate. If the Ming Dynasty had taken a tougher stance at that time, saying, 'Han traitors like Zhao Quan and Qiu Fu are handed over, then I will return Taosongzhai to you,' that would have been a political bargaining chip exchange, wouldn't it?"

He spread his hands and let out an extremely grating sneer.

"And what did the Ming court do? Those high-ranking officials, the ones in charge of writing imperial edicts and the Ministry of War, did something utterly incomprehensible. Instead of taking back Zhao Quan and his group of traitors, they sent Taosong Village back themselves! They were trying to use this 'great power' to influence Anda!"

Zhu Dijun kicked the edge of the podium, his roar deafening.

"Too much persuasion! It's like holding meat in your hand and throwing it to a wolf—expecting the wolf to become your sworn brother? Anda, seeing the Ming Dynasty's weakness and incompetence, immediately turned his back on them. The Taosong Village incident was a complete mishandling; the Ming Dynasty lost both credibility and prestige. From then on, Anda relied even more heavily on Han Chinese guides like Zhao Quan, and the frequency of his incursions into the Central Plains increased exponentially in the following years!"

A parallel Chongzhen era of the Ming Dynasty.

The old, crooked tree on Coal Hill seemed to weep in the cold wind. Zhu Youjian slumped in the frozen mud pit, his eyes fixed on the two names "Zhao Quan" and "Qiu Fu" on the sky.

"Traitor...another traitor..."

Emperor Chongzhen gritted his teeth so hard they made a grinding sound, and his lips bled from biting them.

He knew all too well the despair of being stabbed in the back by his own people. His Liaodong defense line was breached by the cannons brought by Kong Youde; the Qing Dynasty's national administration was built up by the strategies of Fan Wencheng and his group of surrendered officials.

"Why?! Why does my Great Ming Dynasty always produce such ungrateful and treacherous beasts?!"

Zhu Youjian pounded the frozen earth frantically, his flesh mangled and bloodied, letting out a heart-wrenching roar.

"The civil officials in the imperial court are spineless, and the rebels beyond the Great Wall betray their ancestors! In this world, who truly protects the Ming Dynasty?"

The studio's scarlet lights were all turned off, leaving only a cold, incandescent light that shrouded Judy Jun's podium area.

He turned around, erased all the names on the whiteboard with an eraser, and then wrote four large characters heavily at the top with a black marker: "The dead end is sealed."

"Family members. With the Taosongzhai incident over, the Ming Dynasty has completely lost all its diplomatic leverage in the north. Anda has abandoned all thoughts of a short-term ceasefire through trade. The Xuanda defense line has been under constant high-pressure and high-level combat readiness ever since. The Ming Dynasty's treasury is like a water pump that leaks at both ends."

On the holographic screen, the map of the Ming Dynasty in the thirty-seventh year of the Jiajing reign was fragmented.

"In the south, Japanese pirates and smuggling gangs were burning, killing, and looting in the prosperous southeast, and the important tax-producing towns of the country were in ruins, cutting off the Ming Dynasty's source of revenue. In the north, the Tatars, led by Han traitors, invaded year after year, leaving the border towns in ruins, and the silver and grain from the imperial granary were being poured into the nine border regions like a bottomless pit."

Zhu Dijun's fingers tapped hard on the map, his voice low and icy.

"Internally, there was a major earthquake in Guanzhong, a severe drought in Shandong, and a great famine in Liaodong. The common people resorted to cannibalism, officials embezzled military funds, the emperor was practicing alchemy and cultivating immortality in the Western Garden, and the cabinet and Yan's faction were carrying out political purges."

"This is the true face of the Ming Dynasty in the mid-to-late Jiajing period. A state apparatus that was rotten to the core, from finance to military affairs, from domestic policy to diplomacy!"

He pressed a heavy key on the keyboard, and the map on the big screen instantly burned to ashes.

"Faced with such a hellish start, what should we do? Rely on an official document issued by the Ministry of War? Rely on those pampered soldiers in the three major camps of the capital who can't even lift a sword? Or rely on those starving serf soldiers in the garrisons who can only dig up grass roots?"

As Zhu Dijun approached the camera, his bloodshot eyes blazed with a chilling fervor.

"None of them can be relied upon! The Ming Dynasty's conventional organizational structure can no longer save this broken pot!"

He grabbed the red laser pointer and stared intently at an extremely remote and obscure place in the dark corner of the screen.

"This is why, in the thirty-eighth year of the Jiajing reign, a Ming general driven to the brink made a crazy decision that defied all military common sense and even the ancestral rules of the Ming Dynasty!"

The laser pointer suddenly exploded with light, revealing four large, blood-red characters: "[Zhejiang Yiwu]!"

Standing on the devastated southeastern front, Qi Jiguang saw through the mess of this world. The court wouldn't give him money? He'd raise it himself! The garrison troops couldn't fight? He'd kick them aside and recruit his own soldiers!

Zhu Dijun's voice was like a detonating dynamite, making the entire space go numb.

"He doesn't want those slick, old-timer thugs. He wants the kind of thugs who, in the most remote and desolate places, would risk their entire clan's lives to fight each other for a single mineral vein! He wants the kind of vicious wolves who, if you give them a full meal, would charge into the enemy's lines with a spear and die together with them!"

"The imperial court refused to allocate funds for military pay? Despite impeachments from the entire court, Governor-General Hu Zongxian of Zhejiang and Zhili forcibly imposed levies on those wealthy and unscrupulous gentry in Jiangnan, squeezing them dry! These pragmatists, in this extremely corrupt officialdom, used the most ruthless and unreasonable methods to squeeze out the first capital for building the army!"

The emotions of viewers across the entire live stream were completely ignited, and the screen was filled with a sea of ​​fire.

"It's heating up! Mass production of troops in dire straits!"

"The Ming Dynasty's regular army was utterly rotten, but the backbone of the Chinese nation remained unbroken! Qi Jiguang was awesome!"

"This is the only way to break the deadlock! Abandon the corrupt system and go it alone!"

A parallel Jiajing era of the Ming Dynasty.

Inside the Xiyuan Taoist Temple, Emperor Jiajing, Zhu Houcong, stared blankly at the four blood-red characters "Yiwu, Zhejiang" on the sky. The fire in the alchemy furnace had gone too far, emitting a pungent, burnt smell, but he seemed oblivious to it.

Yan Song knelt on the ground, his body drenched in cold sweat. He knew that Tianmu's words had exposed the truth about Hu Zongxian and Qi Jiguang's independent actions, bypassing the Ministry of War. In the eyes of any emperor, this was a capital offense of overstepping authority and treason.

But Jiajing did not lose his temper. This emperor, who prided himself on being exceptionally intelligent, now only had a complex mix of coldness and exhaustion in his eyes. He knew all too well that the Ming Dynasty was already an empty shell, and if no one used such unscrupulous methods to patch up the holes, the Ming Dynasty would truly be finished.

On the sky, Zhu Dijun casually tossed aside the broken piece of chalk, half his face hidden in the shadow of the podium, a sharp, stern smile playing on his lips.

"In this desolate hell, where demons roam the earth, the Ming Dynasty's strongest heavy infantry regiment—the Qi Family Army—is about to be born, trampling over the heads of corrupt officials who profited from the nation's calamity and traitorous smugglers! Are you ready for this dimensional-lowering attack, my family?"