The Classic of Mountains and Seas is a wonderful work in China's pre-Qin classics, which has been called a "fantastic book" since ancient times. This book consists of eighteen volumes, five volumes of mountain classics and thirteen volumes of sea classics. The mountains and seas recorded in Everywhere include mountains and rivers, precious jade minerals, birds, animals and insects, exotic customs and folk customs in all directions. It records the lives of ancient people and is an important document for studying ancient geography, history, mythology, religion, folklore, medicine, biology, minerals and sacrifices.
The fairy tales recorded in The Classic of Mountains and Seas include Kuafu's Pursuit of the Sun, Jingwei's Reclamation, Queen Mother of the West, Nu Wa's Intestine Becomes Ten People, The Battle between Huangdi and Chiyou, Gun Yu's Water Control, Xingtian and so on. The content is strange and imaginative. These fairy tales, plots and characters are very simple, but they gave birth to the embryos of later novels. His romantic writing method had a great influence on later novels. Therefore, Hu Yinglin, a scholar in the Ming Dynasty, regarded it as "the ancestor of strange stories in ancient and modern times", and the Summary of Sikuquanshu in the Qing Dynasty regarded it as "the oldest novel". Wei Jin's strange tales, Tang legends, and later The Journey to the West, The Romance of the Gods, The Edge of the Mirror Flower are all related to Shan Hai Jing.