Sessions
Twelve weeks, each stating one rule and testing it against at least three creatures. Every session names the rule on its own page.
The weeks run in three phases of four. The first builds a classification system that works on the cleanest records, the second puts it under load until fields start failing, and the third rebuilds from what survived. Each week states exactly one rule and is tested against at least three creatures, and creatures recur on purpose: the same record read under a different rule is supposed to look different.
What a classification system is
What the Classic of Mountains and Seas is, what Linnaeus did that we are going to copy, Borges' fake Chinese encyclopedia as the counter-example, and what the book already sorts by.
Week 1 · 22 February 2027
Reading the source text
Where our characters come from. Candidates come from repetition, they have to survive three tests, and the first one the Classic of Mountains and Seas offers is incomplete in more than half the records we cite.
Week 2 · 1 March 2027
Morphological classification
Four composite bodies taken apart into parts and counts. Two of them differ only in where a number sits, one disagrees with itself between its two records, and one is assembled out of no animal at all.
Week 3 · 8 March 2027
Geography and habitat
Three records fill the habitat field the same way and mean three different things by it — a mountain at a derivable position on a route, an unspecified sea, and a country placed relative to the entry before it.
Week 4 · 15 March 2027
Omens and uses
見則天下大旱 stands word for word on six creatures that share no part and no chapter. The omens do fill a closed grid of scope against event, and the cell a creature lands in follows from nothing else on its card.
Week 5 · 22 March 2027
The 神 and the 獸
陆吾 and 开明兽 guard one mountain with nearly one body and are filed in different kingdoms. The difference between them in the record is a job rather than a limb, and several records name no kind at all.
Week 6 · 29 March 2027
Drift
The 青丘之山 record names no beast. 九尾狐 is a handle attached later, so everything the name now carries was added after the record closed — and the same process runs inside the edition, on 狌狌 and on 讙头.
Week 7 · 19 April 2027
Where classification fails
肥遗 names two incompatible snakes and a bird across two chapters, 窫窳 has two records that cannot describe one body, and the entry form has a single name field that cannot hold either fact.
Week 8 · 26 April 2027
Comparative systems
Two bestiaries that never needed a species concept, read for their organising principle rather than ranked against ours. Both sort by what a creature is for the reader, and then the same test is turned back on 其状如.
Week 9 · 3 May 2027
Cross-system comparison
Four creatures filed twice, once under our own system and once under one of last week's two. 夔's two filings drop opposite halves of one line, 帝江 has a clause none of the three can hold, and 驺吾 is the one our system alone fails.
Week 10 · 10 May 2027
Modern reconstruction
The first material this course meets that the edition did not produce. 夫诸's three clauses leave six decisions a model has to make anyway, 帝江 forces a renderer to draw an absence, and on 九尾狐 the audit stops working.
Week 11 · 17 May 2027
The taxonomic congress
Entries are tabled and challenged on one ground only, an undeclared field. 猼訑 shows what the rule does to a shared trait, 窫窳 forces a pick nothing justifies, and the course answers its own question.
Week 12 · 24 May 2027