Monster Hunter’s Journal: I Tame the Classic of Mountains and Seas with My Imagination

Su Yan finds a copy of the Classic of Mountains and Seas with missing pages at an antique market. She takes the inscription on its title page, “Use your imagination as bait to fish for mountain-and-sea spirits,” as a joke, until one late night, while drawing a design, the mechanical nine-tailed fox in her sketch suddenly leaps off the page and smashes her coffee cup with its jaws. The spirits she had criticized as “badly designed” can actually be brought to life through her “imaginative redesigns.”

Even more absurdly, a mysterious man named Lu Wang shows up and thrusts a Confidentiality Agreement from the Bureau of Anomalous Creature Control at her. “The mechanical Qiongqi you drew demolished three city blocks. Either come with me to hunt down the spirits that have gone out of control, or let them demolish your studio.”

From then on, Su Yan is forced to become an “imagination hunter.” She installs a water-cooling system on a drought demon, turning its flame-spewing mouth into a humidifier; welds a smart stomach onto a Taotie and sets it to “three bowls a day”; and even connects a 360-degree rotating surveillance camera to Xing Tian's neck, solving the age-old problem of “not being able to see sneak attacks after getting your head chopped off.”