Where the engine stops
This engine computes arrangements and leaves the interpretation to the reader, and the line between the two is declared entry by entry. Each entry says three things: what stands beyond the line, who asks for it, and why the line falls where it does.
What the engine does carry is an attribute the sources hand down concordantly, provided that attribute belongs to the configuration rather than to somebody’s situation. Even then the attribute travels as an identifier and a glyph, never as prose. A verdict written into a translated gloss could not be tested by anybody, where an identifier and a glyph can be held against the source they came from.
The 用神 yòngshén
Asked by everyone who casts a chart for a question.
Which palace bears on the question is the reader’s choice, made for that question. Without it the board is a map without a pin, and choosing it is the first act of interpretation, not a lookup. A prompt commissions the choice and requires it declared; the engine never makes it.
Last checked against the engine on August 22, 2026.
Configurations ranked, and any best palace
Asked by anyone wanting to know which palace is the good one.
The configurations themselves travel, with the fortune the sources hand down beside them: 門迫 ménpò is oppression in the text that names it, and an engine that dropped it would be editing its sources. What does not travel is an order over them. A chart holding four inauspicious configurations is not a bad time to do anything: bad is a word about an undertaking, and no undertaking is known here.
Last checked against the engine on August 22, 2026.
Ordering two hours, and dating an outcome
Asked by anyone choosing a time, and anyone who wants to know when.
Choosing a time walks an interval and reports where in it each hour stands, against criteria you state. It does not rank what it finds, and its answers carry a direction as well as an hour: the direction is half of the answer, and the hour is never reported without it. Dating an outcome is refused outright: it is the prediction this project does not make.
Last checked against the engine on August 22, 2026.
Advice
Asked by almost everybody, eventually.
What a board is for here is reflection: a reader looks at an arrangement, considers what it sets beside what, and decides for themselves what that is worth to them. It is not a source of professional advice, and it does not become one by being read carefully. No reading here gives medical, psychiatric, legal or financial counsel, lucky numbers, gambling picks, a partner judged or a compatibility settled. A question about a symptom, a contract or a sum of money belongs to somebody qualified to answer it, and nothing on this site is a reason to put off asking them. Where a reading of a life is commissioned the verbs stay conditional — «tends to», never «you will» — and the power over a person’s choices and their path stays theirs.
Last checked against the engine on August 29, 2026.
Which palace stands for which part of a life
Asked by readers of modern 年命 niánmìng material, and models, very confidently.
Refused wherever a 年命 niánmìng appears, and stated at every surface rather than once, because this is where a model invents most freely. What is carried is the pillar of the birth year and the pillar of the year being lived, the palaces the two fall in, and what the ground under them is made of. There it stops: the text’s own verdicts on that ground need a question to have been asked.
Last checked against the engine on August 22, 2026.
A chart of dunjia cast on a birth
Asked by the modern natal-Qi-Men literature.
A birth enters a chart, never the other way about: the classical text puts the person’s year inside the chart of the moment, and the chart does not move for the birth. The error recurs because the Western natal chart is one instance of a class this tradition already fills in several ways — an art natively about a life gets a board of its own, 八字 bāzì, 七政四餘 qīzhèng sìyú or 紫微斗數 zǐwēi dǒushù, and never dunjia’s.
Last checked against the engine on August 22, 2026.
The received readings of 太乙 tàiyǐ
Asked by anyone who opens the text.
The transmitted doctrine of this board is dynastic — which state falls, in which year an army breaks — dated, falsifiable by nobody, and it stays out. The per-palace readings of the same chapter are declined entirely, because behind them there is no layer that is not dynastic. What travels is what the text says a shape is; where it says nothing, the silence travels with it.
Last checked against the engine on August 22, 2026.
Who is 主 zhǔ and who is 客 kè
Asked by every reader of a 太乙 tàiyǐ board, immediately.
The engine names two counts and stops. Assigning host and guest is the first interpretive act that system asks for, and it is the reader’s exactly as the 用神 yòngshén is. A prompt commissions it and requires it signed.
Last checked against the engine on August 22, 2026.
A strong or weak day master, and what compensates
Asked by every reader of the four pillars.
The five elements arrive counted over the eight characters, zeroes included, because an absence weighs as much as an abundance — and the count is printed so that nobody has to recount it. Declaring the day master strong or weak, and choosing what compensates an absence, are steps of a method: the schools divide on how it is done, so the choice is made aloud in the reading, with the method named.
Last checked against the engine on August 22, 2026.
紫氣 zǐqì, the fourth remainder
Asked by readers expecting four 餘 yú on a 七政四餘 qīzhèng sìyú board.
Three of the four are placed by ephemeris and the fourth is placed by a transmitted rule. What stays refused is a degree for it: the rule gives a palace, and a lodge is a stretch of some thirteen degrees inside a palace of thirty. Each half of that placement — the rate, and the one dated board of 1886 it is carried from — rests on a single text, where the other three rest on the sky. The board says so under itself, and you can lay it without the fourth.
Last checked against the engine on September 1, 2026.
The 十八飛星 shíbāfēixīng placements
Asked by anyone holding both books of 紫微斗數 zǐwēi dǒushù.
That art names two boards and this engine computes one of them. The other transmission counts eighteen stars off the year branch, has no bureau of the five phases, no 天府 tiānfǔ, and not one of the fourteen main stars. A placement carried across is a graft rather than a gap being filled — the same error as a natal chart of dunjia, made smaller and between two books that share a title.
Last checked against the engine on August 22, 2026.
茅山 máoshān
Asked by the parameter that lists it.
No reference exists, runnable or transmitted, against which a 茅山 máoshān chart could be falsified. It is refused by name rather than substituted, because a chart cast by the wrong method looks right and is not. It stands on the list of what is declared and unimplemented, and it is not expected to leave it.
Last checked against the engine on August 22, 2026.
A place from a name
Asked by every convenience API.
Nothing here turns a name into a place. There are dozens of towns called Rome, and picking the most populous for somebody produces a chart that looks right and is wrong. What the surfaces take is an identifier chosen from a search, or coordinates with a zone, or an identifier refined by coordinates — and half a pair is refused rather than half-read.
Last checked against the engine on August 22, 2026.
The latitude, in any calculation
Asked by anyone who assumes a chart uses both coordinates.
The longitude is what moves a board. The latitude is carried and printed and enters no calculation. The one method that would read it — cutting the twelve palaces of 七政四餘 qīzhèng sìyú by houses — is a declared parameter with that value refused. The bound is stated here and not in the form: a control somebody opens on purpose to type a longitude into is opened by somebody who knows what one is.
Last checked against the engine on August 22, 2026.
Two boards of one instant, in one prompt
Asked by the obvious feature request.
A consultation takes one instrument, chosen before the press and at no point after it. Where two boards agree it is frequently one fact printed twice — a chart of dunjia and a 六壬 liùrén board share the day pillar, the decade, the void branches and five of the eight spirits — and a model reading that as corroboration counts one datum as two with complete confidence.
Last checked against the engine on August 22, 2026.
Two schools of one art, in one reading
Asked by anyone who has just been given the choice.
Two schools of one art laid on one instant are not two witnesses: they share the pillars, the ju or the seats, and nearly everything else they are made of, so what they agree on is precisely the part neither of them ever disputed. A board is cast by one school and read as that school’s. Comparing two is a real thing to do — it is the reason the choice exists — and it is done by laying each and reading each, not by merging them or by offering their agreement as evidence.
Last checked against the engine on August 29, 2026.
A school’s doctrine, in this engine’s voice
Asked by every reader who wants to know what the board they chose means.
A school teaches what an arrangement is for, and the temptation is to ship that teaching beside the values it moved. What may travel is what already travels for the conditions of 太乙 tàiyǐ, under the same four bounds: the source’s own words, a clause rather than a paragraph, always glossed, and always attached to something the engine computed. A verdict in this engine’s own prose is a verdict nothing can test; a quotation can be tested twice over — it is in the text or it is not, and it is that school’s or it is not.
Last checked against the engine on August 29, 2026.