He was three years into studying plum blossom before he would read for anyone. The method takes the external response: whatever happens at the moment of casting counts.
First reading. He had just raised the hexagram when a bird hit the window. He wrote it in the notebook: bird, struck window, roughly a quarter of an hour after casting. The reading came out right.
Second: a bowl broke next door. Noted. Right again.
He kept the log for three years. Four notebooks. Each entry gives the date, the hour, the hexagram, what the response was, and how long after the casting it came.
In the second year he noticed something.
The responses were arriving earlier.
First year, the average was about the burning time of a stick of incense. Second year it was down to a few minutes. Third year, several of them came at the same moment as the casting.
Once he had not decided whether to cast at all — he had only taken the coins out — and the response came first. The dog at the gate barked three times, and it matched the hexagram he raised afterwards.
He laid the four notebooks out on the desk and sorted every response by the interval. First year positive, second year near zero, third year negative and getting steadily more so.
He drew the line and extended it back.
It reaches March, twenty-nine years ago. He was born that March.