The night of March 18th in the 17th year of Chongzhen.
The city of Beijing was destroyed, and the crooked-necked tree in Meishan was waiting for its fate in the wind.
Zhu Youjian looked down at the sword on his waist that had not been unlocked for seventeen years, and suddenly asked himself:
"What if I don't?"
He is not dead.
That night, he climbed out of the Forbidden City from the culvert of the Wenhua Palace, stepped on the broken moon of the Jade River, and boarded a broken boat with a leaky bottom.
On the boat were an old eunuch, a fleeing military household, a soldier who was crawling to nowhere, and a young man who was fainting from the fever.
This was the entire team of the sixteenth emperor of the Ming Dynasty when he moved south.
He wants to escape.
Not to survive.
It is to change the period in the history book into a series of unfinished ellipses.
Here are the old ministers with white hair as white as snow under the Huangji sect, the vassal town who knelt down to receive the silver medal outside the city of Yangzhou, the old slave who said "Your Majesty is not a saint", and the Governor of Fengyang who waited all night by the river.
There are broken sleeves, old seals, broken-edged swords, old lacquer engraved with "no debt", and orphans who learn to read account books in the east veranda of Huangji Gate.
There is also an emperor who finally learned to say "I was wrong."
He is not a sage, nor a wise master.
He is just a man who came down from Coal Mountain.
Carrying seventeen years of carrying the wrong person, the salary he owed, and the eyes he dared not look at.
Tonight he spread his account book under the blue sky and white sun in Nanjing.
Then he asked the civil and military officials of the Manchu Dynasty:
"If I want to open this rotten house without tearing down the beams and pillars and just open a window——
Is this door open or not? "
