Side story: Chang'e the ascender
This was one of the pieces in my interpretation series on the "Classic of Mountains and Seas" that I wrote long ago, back during Blue White Society. Since more and more of it became relevant to the plot, I moved this side story over to the new book to help new readers understand.
Read it if you feel like settling down and taking a look. Otherwise, skip it.
It really was just my personal interpretation, though whenever I interpreted something, I tended to wander far afield, with clues and lines of reasoning that drew on all sorts of knowledge.
And with some of those points, explaining them thoroughly made things bloated, while not explaining them thoroughly left me worried you wouldn't know what I meant...
So I always ended up having to write some side stories for this "Classic of Mountains and Seas interpretation series"...
Although I didn't use texts outside the "Classic of Mountains and Seas" as evidence for my interpretations, they could still provide directions for my thinking.
Those ancient texts were right there. With modern information so readily available, you could search them out, look them up, and offer your own views if you cared to.
By considering another person's interpretation alongside their character and political stance, you could judge the likely bias in what they described. Then, comparing it against the "Classic of Mountains and Seas," you could infer which sections were spurious and which might preserve the original appearance of remote antiquity.
You also had to compare other texts to learn what changes a legend had undergone and in which direction it had evolved. Then you could work backward to determine what its original form might have been.
Without question, ancient texts from the Pre-Qin Period were the most persuasive.