Lin Wan’er stared at the hexagram formed by the nine copper coins, her heart growing increasingly astonished.
She had never encountered such an ambiguous situation before, or one that was so evenly split.
Among the nine copper coins, four had their obverse and reverse sides aligned precisely with the life gate, while the other four aligned precisely with the death gate. Yet the crucial ninth coin had landed exactly in a position that could mean life or death.
This position of life or death did not refer to the coin itself. Rather, when viewed together with the four life gate coins, the five coins formed a hexagram of the life gate.
But if viewed with the other four death gate coins, they formed a hexagram of the death gate.
It was like two nations at war, where a child of mixed heritage from both countries was born at the perfect moment. With the two nations equally matched in power, everything hinged on this child to tip the scales. If the child joined the father’s nation, it would oppose the mother’s, and vice versa.
Lin Wan’er had divined hexagrams for hundreds of years, yet this was the first time she had seen such a strange one.
She silently gathered the nine copper coins and tossed them again. Although the positions of all the coins had changed this time, her interpretation of the hexagram led to the exact same conclusion.
Seeing her furrowed brows, Ye Chen could not help but ask again: “Miss Lin, what does this hexagram show?”
Lin Wan’er shook her head: “It is the same as before, no changes at all.”
Ye Chen was astonished and asked her: “I noted down the obverse and reverse sides, as well as the positions of all the coins just now. Compared to the previous one, every coin has changed position, and some sides have flipped too. Why is the hexagram the same?”
Lin Wan’er smiled slightly: “Young Master has learned feng shui from the Nine Mysterious Heavenly Scripture, but it seems there is no divination in it. Hexagrams are not interpreted from appearances alone, but through their unique logic. The two hexagrams may seem unrelated on the surface, but the results they yield are identical.”
Ye Chen sighed: “The Nine Mysterious Heavenly Scripture truly has no profound arts of divination.”
Lin Wan’er explained: “The wonder of divination lies in its underlying logic, equivalent to a software system capable of simulation and computation.”
“Young Master is now involved in car manufacturing, so you should know that in modern simulations of car crashes, aside from actual crash tests, one can also simulate them in software. The software incorporates Earth’s physical constants. During simulation, one only needs to input parameters like the vehicle’s weight, speed, crash design, material strength, collision point, and collision object to predict the crash outcome with about seventy to eighty percent accuracy.”
“This servant’s divination relies on the I Ching and the eight trigrams. The ancients, though without computers, grasped the underlying logic of the world’s, even the universe’s, operations through years of observation. They then created the I Ching and eight trigrams. The core of the I Ching is ‘yin and yang’, which is essentially the earliest binary system, akin to the 0s and 1s of the computer world. This servant uses copper coins for divination, where the obverse and reverse sides correspond to yin and yang, another form of binary.”
“This servant’s nine copper coins are like nine key parameters in a computer simulation. Hand these nine parameters to the I Ching and eight trigrams software for processing, and it can predict the direction, outcome, and variables of an event. As long as the event’s development does not deviate from this world’s operational patterns, the prediction will not stray far from accuracy. Although the tossed nine copper coins differ in position and sides, the reason for using nine coins in divination is that it depends not on the state of a single coin, but on the relationships among the nine coins. In other words, whether the nine coins are tossed on a table, in a room, or scattered across the entire courtyard, it would not affect the result.”
