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

The countdown in the live stream room has reached zero.

Zhu Dijun pushed open the studio door and walked back to the podium. He didn't take a water cup or a whiteboard marker. In his hand was the encrypted tablet he had just used.

Princess 50 stood in the shadows, the faint hum of her machine's operation particularly clear in the quiet studio.

Zhu Dijun walked in front of the camera. He didn't look at the comment section. He kept his head down, swiped his fingers across the screen a few times, and transferred a document to the holographic projection terminal.

The holographic screen lit up, displaying several extremely high-resolution photos of the on-site exploration. The photos showed newly unearthed stone tablets, bamboo slips, and a royal jade tablet sealed in a box made of Phoebe zhennan wood. A joint red security watermark from the State Administration of Cultural Heritage and the State Security Bureau was also visible in the corners.

"Family members."

Zhu Dijun spoke. His voice was a little hoarse, not the kind of hoarseness that comes from talking too much, but a dryness caused by the extreme tension in his vocal cords.

"What I'm about to say has nothing to do with the Wanli Emperor. It has nothing to do with any of the prepared scripts."

He placed the tablet on the table and pushed it aside.

"I want to apologize to you."

Zhu Dijun took a step back, faced the camera, bent down, and gave a deep, solid bow. Ninety degrees. He paused for a full ten seconds.

A barrage of question marks appeared in the comment section.

Judy Jun straightened up. The light shone on his face, which remained expressionless.

"This information was sent to me simultaneously by the National Security Bureau and the Archaeological Frontline fifteen minutes ago. It describes a high-status, hidden imperial tomb from the Ming Dynasty that has never been looted. There are no gold or silver treasures buried inside. It's full of books, stone tablets, and authentic chronicles printed by the Ming Dynasty royal family."

He turned around, picked up a marker, and wrote two words on the whiteboard—"pseudo-history."

"From today onwards, everything in the history of the Ming Dynasty that we used to read, and the years you saw in your textbooks, except for the real stories about how the civil service group exploited the common people, is all fake."

He listed a row of years on the whiteboard and began filling in the numbers. The marker screeched as it rubbed against the whiteboard.

"Look carefully. This is the original Ming Dynasty imperial genealogy document unearthed from the ground, which records the actual reign years."

The 40th year of the Hongwu reign.

The 39th year of the Yongle reign.

The 23rd year of the Xuande reign.

The Zhengtong and Tianshun dynasties combined and reigned for 30 years.

The 33rd year of the Chenghua reign.

The 30th year of the Hongzhi reign.

The 40th year of the Zhengde reign.

The 60th year of the Jiajing reign.

The 40th year of the Longqing reign.

The 60th year of the Wanli reign.

The year 16 of the Tianqi reign.

The 28th year of the Chongzhen Emperor's reign.

The 14th year of the Jingtai reign.

After writing the last number, Zhu Dijun threw the pen on the table. The pen rolled twice on the table before falling to the ground with a crisp sound.

"I was just in the bathroom, checking this data in front of the mirror."

Zhu Dijun pointed to the whiteboard.

"I've realized I'm a joke. I, someone with Zhu family blood flowing through my veins, spend all day here dissecting the underlying logic of the Ming Dynasty, yet I don't even know how long my own ancestors lived or how long they reigned."

His eyes reddened. Tears welled up in his eyes and then, without warning, streamed down his cheeks.

He didn't wipe them away. He let the tears fall onto the microphone pop filter in front of him.

"Those Manchus. Aisin-Gioro Hongli, that boar-skin chieftain who called himself 'Tengrit Gugeqi Khan.' He not only altered the written language, he shattered the entire timeline of the Ming Dynasty."

After a three-second pause, the live stream chat exploded, filling the screen with overlapping text that scrolled too fast to read.

["Wait, didn't Zhu Yuanzhang die in the 31st year of the Hongwu reign? What's with the 40th year of the Hongwu reign? Did Zhu Yunwen actually kill Zhu Yuanzhang?"]

"This data is even more absurd than Zhu Di's four-year Jingnan Rebellion! And the timing of Jianwen's reign is also wrong!"

[“Upstairs, think about it this way. If Hongwu lived for 40 years, would Zhu Yunwen's policy of weakening the princes and the establishment of the Jianwen reign still exist? Who really killed Zhu Yuanzhang? Was it a conspiracy between the civil service group and the corrupt official Yezhupi to deliberately shorten the reign of the founding emperor?”]

["Wait, the 40th year of Zhengde? Then the Mongol name that Emperor Wuzong of Ming, Zhu Houzhao, called himself, Kublai Khan... could it be true? Did he split into Kublai Khan, the Yuan Dynasty emperor, and Zhu Houzhao, the Ming Dynasty emperor? Is the timeline of the Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties completely out of order?"]

"That damned civil service! Those damned barbarians! They deserve to die! They deserve to die!"

"There are five thieves in the mountains and seas, like beasts, ghosts, demons, and monsters; those who hunt them prosper! I was once deceived by the fake 'Yin Fu Jing' circulating in the market; these are the original words! If it weren't for the archaeological discovery, how long would we have been kept in the dark?"

Zhu Dijun looked at the comments and wiped his face.

"You've spotted the problem, haven't you? Decades or even centuries have been ripped out of the timeline out of thin air."

He walked to the whiteboard and pointed to "40th year of Hongwu".

"If Zhu Yuanzhang reigned for 40 years, he would have died in 1408. Zhu Di would not have needed to wage the Jingnan Campaign for four years. Or rather, the truth about the Jingnan Campaign was not a power struggle between uncle and nephew, but another physical purge of the civil officials who had been infiltrated by foreign forces. The Qing dynasty fabricated this timeline to create a drama of fratricide."

He pointed to the 40th year of Zhengde's reign.

"Zhengde. The emperor in history who died from drowning due to his playfulness. He reigned for 40 years. Think about it, how could an emperor who lived for so long and was invincible in the surrounding areas be a ridiculous emperor who died without an heir? Then check Kublai Khan's life trajectory and compare it with the real Zhengde's daily records. Those overlapping routes of western expeditions, military achievements and military systems."

Zhu Dijun turned around and looked directly at the camera.

"Why did Wild Boar Skin change the timeline? Because if the lifespans and reigns of the Ming emperors weren't shortened, the legitimacy of the Manchu conquest of China would be completely nonexistent. If we don't fragment the timeline of the Ming Dynasty, we can't explain why groundbreaking technological creations could appear in the mid-Ming Dynasty. They forcibly dismantled and grafted the achievements of the Ming Dynasty onto other dynasties, or even erased them."

He looked down at the few remaining pages of documents on the table, materials he had originally prepared to describe the corruption of the Wanli reign. He reached out, crumpled the papers together, and threw them into the trash can.

"It's true that those civil officials harmed the people. It's also true that they monopolized wealth. But when they were compiling the History of Ming during the Qing Dynasty, they made a deal with their Manchu masters. The Manchus preserved the privileges and lands of the scholar-officials for the civil officials, and in return, the civil officials helped the Manchus break the backbone of the Ming Dynasty in the history books."

Zhu Dijun's hands rested on the podium, his voice echoing in the hall.

"I apologize to you. This is a dereliction of duty by the descendants of the Chinese nation. From now on, this course will no longer be called 'The Feast of Sharing the Spoils in the Ming Dynasty.' This course will be renamed."

He wrote five large characters at the top of the whiteboard.

Ming Dynasty: Top Secret Files