He read for other people for twenty years. Every hexagram in the book came up at one time or another.
When he cast for himself, for twenty years, it was Gu.
Worms in a bowl. Something left until it spoiled. The line texts say the same thing over and over: setting right the father's spoiling.
His father died when he was eleven.
There was nothing left to set right. The house was rented and they gave it back. What was owed his mother cleared in two years. No litigation, no enemies, no other woman.
That is what he had always believed.
He went to the line texts in the manual his teacher gave him — twenty years of use, the spine gone, resewn with thread.
The top line was blank.
Not a printing fault. There is a shallow depression in the paper. The characters have been taken off with a razor, and the hand was steady: only those, with the commentary above and below untouched.
He bought a new copy. In the new one the top line is blank too, scraped the same way.
He went round three second-hand bookshops and found four different editions, from a Republican-era printing to one from the eighties.
All four, the same position, the same scraping. The oldest cut has oxidised at the paper's edge — it has been there for decades.