A live-streamed Chinese language lesson under the sky—the ancients were taken aback.

During the Hongwu reign.

The lights in Wuying Hall burned all night, but no one dared to go in or leave.

Mao Xiang stood guard on the stone steps outside the palace. He was the commander of the Embroidered Uniform Guard, a man who killed without hesitation, but at this moment he didn't even dare to breathe loudly.

He would rather go to the grasslands and fight the Mongols than stay here.

Heaven knows what kind of emperor will emerge when that palace door opens again.

Inside the hall, Zhu Yuanzhang had a copy of the Tao Te Ching, which he had personally annotated, lying open in front of him.

Yes, he did. In the seventh year of the Hongwu reign, he spent three whole months reading it line by line and annotating it sentence by sentence.

Zhu Yuanzhang had only recently ascended the throne, and he was skeptical of what the officials said. He read through a lot of books by various schools of thought, but finally stopped at the Tao Te Ching.

Lao Tzu's way of speaking is simple yet profound, without being deliberately mysterious, but the more you ponder it, the more flavorful it becomes.

He was particularly struck by the line, "The people do not fear death, so why threaten them with death?"

Zhu Yuanzhang originally ruled the country with strict laws and severe punishments, and executed corrupt officials one after another, but criminals kept coming one after another, and he could not kill them all.

Lao Tzu's words made him more restrained, and the next day he issued an edict abolishing some of the most severe punishments.

Zhu Yuanzhang believed in Laozi, or at least part of him.

Now that Tianmu has finished talking about the Tang Dynasty, he's throwing Lao Tzu's four sayings in his face: "Square but not cutting, honest but not hurtful, straightforward but not unrestrained, bright but not dazzling."

When he annotated these sentences back then, he thought they were just the four standards for a sage to govern a country, not hard to understand, and he could just write a few nice words and move on.

"Oh, my old man," he said, his voice hoarse.

"You write these grand principles, but can you actually live by them yourself? 'Straightforward without being cutting,' let me ask you, you've never hurt anyone in your life, what have you accomplished? Besides leaving behind five thousand words, what else have you left behind?"

Zhu Yuanzhang stood up, paced around the hall, walked three times, then suddenly stopped, pointed at the book "Tao Te Ching," his fingers trembling slightly.

"We begged our way out of Haozhou. We're not good at being gentle, kind, respectful, frugal, or modest. All we know is that right is right, and wrong is wrong. Corrupt officials should be killed, and treacherous ministers should be tortured. Now you're telling me that killing can't solve the problem? Then let me ask you, how can we solve it without killing? By reasoning with corrupt officials? By having tea with powerful figures?"

"We've killed our whole lives, and you expect us to admit we were wrong?"

He reached for the teacup, but his fingers touched the rim and then withdrew. The tea had gone cold. He didn't ask anyone to replace it; he just stared blankly at the cold tea.

After a long while, he spoke, his voice calmer than before, but beneath the calm lay a deeper restlessness.

"Okay, you say killing can't solve the fundamental problem, and we understand that now, alright? The system has problems, and we can't just plug the holes by killing people, okay? Then tell us, how do we change it? The equal-field system will collapse, the militia system will collapse, the garrison system will collapse, so what won't collapse?"

He turned to look at the sky outside the window.

"Those people in the Heavenly Curtain have seen through us across thousands of years. They know what we will do, what our descendants will do, and how the Ming Dynasty will perish."

Zhu Yuanzhang's voice suddenly rose by half a point.

"Then tell me! How can we prevent the country from collapsing? How can we prevent the system from becoming rigid? How can we encourage future generations to reform? Just saying 'it'll explode sooner or later' is just deliberately driving people crazy!"

The last sentence was almost shouted out, and Mao Xiang outside the hall trembled.

After he roared, the hall fell into a deeper silence. Zhu Yuanzhang stood there, leaning on the corner of the table, his chest heaving.

Zhu Yuanzhang's voice was hoarse. "I've always believed that only incompetent rulers and treacherous ministers can cause a country to perish. Emperor Xuanzong of Tang was such a senile old man. He favored An Lushan, used Li Linfu, and neglected state affairs. If he didn't bring about the downfall of the country, who would? That's what I think."

He sat down and opened the "Imperial Ancestral Instructions of the Ming Dynasty" that he had personally compiled.

This is a book he spent ten years writing, a code of governance for the descendants of the Zhu family.

It stipulated how the emperor should act, how officials should behave, and how the people should be governed.

He thought he had plugged all the loopholes.

Zhu Yuanzhang turned to the last page of the "Imperial Ancestral Instructions of the Ming Dynasty".

Those were his words to future generations: I came from humble beginnings, without the achievements of my predecessors, yet I have come to rule the world. Therefore, I have no choice but to govern with strict laws and severe punishments. Future generations should carry on my will and uphold my laws.

He slowly sat back down at his desk, picked up his brush, and added another paragraph to the "Imperial Ancestral Instructions of the Ming Dynasty".

The law is not a law for all ages, but a law for a particular time. As times change and the world changes, the law should also change.

"If you think the rules we set are wrong, then change them. As we said, if anyone dares to use our ancestral teachings to suppress you, then show them this passage. This is our final statement, and it counts more than all the previous ones."

After finishing writing, he threw down his pen, and ink splattered onto the floor tiles.

After looking at it for a while, he suddenly picked up the book again, staring at the passage he had just written, his brows furrowing more and more tightly.

"No, no, no, we're going too far. If we let them change things as they please, what if some spendthrift comes along and changes all the wealth we've worked so hard to build? What if they abolish the imperial examination system? What if they abolish the military garrisons? What if they turn the Ming Dynasty into…?"

Zhu Yuanzhang didn't finish speaking, but the expression on his face clearly showed that he had already envisioned a disobedient descendant who would completely change the face of the country.

He picked up his pen and added a sentence after that passage: "But the military system, taxation, and official system must be discussed in court by the Nine Ministers before any changes are made, and must be approved by more than two-thirds of them. Furthermore, a sacrifice must be offered to us at the imperial mausoleum."

After writing it down and reading it over, Zhu Yuanzhang still frowned.

"Isn't two-thirds too high? What if some treacherous officials band together and we don't have enough people to reach the required number?"

He picked up his pen again, intending to change "two-thirds" to "more than half," but the pen stopped mid-air.

"More than half isn't enough either; even treacherous officials could make up half the number. So how do we know who the loyal ministers and treacherous officials are in future generations?"

After a long silence, he gave a bitter laugh.

"We even want to control what happens after we die, and we can't even rest easy about how our descendants change things. On one hand, we say 'you have to change,' but on the other hand, we don't trust you to change. What are we doing..."

He shook his head and didn't say anything more.

The problem doesn't lie with his descendants, it lies with him.

Zhu Yuanzhang was the biggest path dependency; he held everything in his hands, and no one dared to disobey him.

Then Da Ming walked along that road to its end.

One comment on the screen said that if the changes in production relations cannot keep up with the development of productive forces, it will explode sooner or later.

He still didn't fully understand, but this time he didn't want to struggle with himself anymore. He admitted it, admitted that he couldn't understand, admitted that he couldn't do it, admitted that some problems couldn't be solved by killing, and admitted that everything he had built in his life would eventually decay after his death.

He opened his eyes, his gaze falling on the direction where the sky had once hung.

"Tianmu, you've explained the fate of the Tang Dynasty to us, thank you. But I still want to ask, what did later generations do? What was their world like, those young people who spoke gibberish? Did they resolve it? Or...?"

His voice lowered, and he suddenly remembered what Tianmu had said at the beginning: there would be no emperor in later generations.