Bestiary entry

What the congress tables. One new entry for a creature outside the course's twenty-five, admissible under the week 12 rule, with its gaps declared.

Due: 24 May 2027 · Weight: 25%

The brief#

Write one admissible entry for a creature the course does not already carry, and declare which of its own fields the cited line fails to supply.

Week 12’s rule is the admissibility rule, and it is short: an entry is admissible only if it cites a line and states what that line does not give it. The entry form asks for a name in both scripts, a pinyin reading, an invented binomial, the kind word the text itself uses, form, habitat, omen, use and at least one citation. Most records will not fill most of those fields. That is the expected result, not a failed submission.

The 山海经 (Shānhǎijīng, the Classic of Mountains and Seas) has more creatures than the twenty-five in this bestiary, and the short records are the better choice. 双双 (shuāngshuāng) is recorded as 有三青獸相並，名曰雙雙。 Ten characters. There is a name, a colour, a count and a posture, and the entry form’s remaining six fields have nothing to put in them. An entry on 双双 that fills those six is a fabrication. An entry that lists them as unsupplied is a finding, because it shows exactly how much of a bestiary entry is normally supplied by the reader.

Longer records fail differently. 鸣蛇 (míngshé) arrives with form, sound and omen — 其中多鳴蛇，其狀如蛇而四翼，其音如磬，見則其邑大旱。 — and the omen is the same drought that 顒 (yú) and 肥遗 (féiyí) carry in almost the same words, so the field is filled and worthless at once. Say so if it happens to you.

The binomial is invented, and the entry has to say it is invented. Genus comes from the source name, species from the diagnostic trait in the 其狀如 clause. Naming the trait you chose is part of the work: it is the one place where your system’s judgement is visible in a single word.

What you submit#

The entry itself, in the course’s form, and a commentary of about twelve hundred words. The commentary does three things. It justifies the binomial. It lists the unsupplied fields and says what a reader would have had to invent to fill each. It states what admitting this entry costs the system you proposed at the midterm — a field that now has to widen, a rule that now has an exception, or a question the system has to start refusing.

If you cannot locate the line in the edition, mark the entry unverified and submit it unverified. An unverified entry claims nothing: no omen, no use, no confident prose. It is a complete and markable submission in that state.

How it is marked#

Admissibility and cost carry sixty of the hundred marks between them. A well-made entry that costs the system nothing has probably chosen a creature that was never going to test it.