Fengshen Yanyi (Volume 1 and 2)

Author: Xu Zhonglin (Ming) / Continuation by / Wang Shuanghuai (Annotations)
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-03-01
Features: Fengshen Yanyi is a romanticist fantasy novel about gods and demons, characterized by absurd imagination in character creation, storytelling, and detail arrangement. The author's imagination is astonishing. For example, in Chapter 58, Lü Yue sprinkles plague pills into the rivers and springs of Xiqi, infecting the entire Zhou army and civilians with the plague, rendering them powerless; in Chapter 81, Yu De spreads poison (smallpox) in all directions, again putting the Zhou army in dire straits, causing fever and smallpox outbreaks among all officers and soldiers. Given the scientific knowledge of the time, the author would never have realized the existence of bacteria, let alone the infectious nature of viruses and their deadly threat to human health.