He went to the temple to ask about one thing. He shook the cylinder, a stick fell, he picked it up and cast the blocks.
Negative. Both rounded sides up.
He drew again and cast again. Negative.
A third time. A fourth. The temple keeper watched for a while and then went off to do something else.
He came back every day. Different sticks, more than thirty casts, not one sacred answer. On the twentieth day the keeper told him the god was not going to answer and he should stop asking.
He kept coming.
On the forty-seventh day, twenty past seven in the morning, not many people about, he shook the cylinder, a stick fell, and he cast.
Sacred on the first throw. One flat, one rounded, lying on the brick floor.
He took the stick to the book of oracle slips. Number sixty-four. He turned to it.
The entry was blank. It was the only blank in the book.
The keeper came and looked, and turned pages for a long time, and said this stick was not one of theirs. There had never been a sixty-four. The book was printed with sixty-three.
He held the stick and looked into the cylinder, and counted what was left.
Sixty-four. On the tail of the extra one, a string of numbers had been cut into the bamboo. It was the hour and day of his birth.