Classic of Mountains and Seas Species Conservation Society

Civil servant Chen Ke wakes up one day to find he's become Taotie, the infamous monster of myth! Worse still, as soon as he opens his eyes, he's caught by the Heavenly Court's Endangered Divine Beast Protection Association for “accidentally eating” a nationally protected animal, a Huan. To hang on to his hard-won “iron rice bowl” (a position in the Heavenly Court's civil service), he's forced to sign a “community service order”: patrol the Shanhai Realm for a century and devote himself to rescuing endangered divine beasts.

But this former overworked office drone has a very unusual idea of “protection.” He livestreams sales of “tail-fur wellness combs” for an anxious, balding nine-tailed fox, helps Qiongqi, a habitual brawler, apply for recognition as an inheritor of “intangible cultural heritage claw arts,” and even secures “infrastructure loans” for Jingwei's ocean-filling project, successfully reinventing himself as an island developer! Best of all, he gets the formless Hundun to host a blind-box art exhibition, unexpectedly making it an abstract-art top-tier star.

Just as Chen Ke's modern administrative thinking and devilishly clever marketing take divine-beast protection to new heights, the Heavenly Court puts him on trial for “inadequate protection.” The endangered beasts go on strike en masse for the first time, bringing the Shanhai Realm to the brink of collapse. At the critical moment, Chen Ke takes his “wild schemes” to the next level: he pushes through the Divine Beast Rights Act and somehow turns the rigid Heavenly Court protection association into a joint-stock company with the divine beasts as shareholders!

The Shanhai Classic Species Protection Association: Watch the most timid civil servant use Excel and PowerPoint to keep his government job in a world of gods and demons, while rewriting the rules of the Three Realms along the way! A hilarious yet heartwarming workplace comedy about strange creatures, solving the most outrageous mythical crises with the most “proper” administrative methods!