Careful Steps

Walking somewhere genuinely risky.

The situation

You can proceed, but the margin for error is thin and the risk is real, not imagined.

What it asks of you

Be scrupulous about conduct. Precision, not boldness, is what keeps this safe.

Where it leads

The six lines

1. initial Walking in plain undyed shoes. Go on; nothing goes wrong. 素履，往无咎
2. second The road is level and even. A person who keeps out of sight does well on it. 履道坦坦，幽人貞吉
3. third A one-eyed man thinks he sees, a lame man thinks he walks — and treads on the tiger's tail. It bites. 眇能視，跛能履，履虎尾，咥人，凶
4. fourth Treading on the tiger's tail, terrified the whole way. It ends well. 履虎尾，愬愬，終吉
5. fifth Walking with complete conviction. Correct, and dangerous. 夬履，貞厲
6. top Look back over the way you came and weigh the signs. If it circles back to the start, that is as good as it gets. 視履考祥，其旋元吉

The line texts are the oldest layer of the book. They are pictures, not instructions, and they are meant to be held against your own situation rather than decoded.

How this one is built

Written out as six lines, bottom to top, this pattern is 111011 — a solid line is 1, a broken line is 0. Every relationship above is arithmetic on those six digits, not interpretation: reverse the order and you get the other side, flip every digit and you get the opposite reading, take the middle four and you get what sits underneath. Anyone can check the result, which is what separates a structure from a fortune.

The sequence is built the same way. The sixty-four are arranged in thirty-two pairs, and turned upside down it becomes Small Gains. The rule holds for all thirty-two pairs without exception — twenty-eight joined by reversal, four by inversion.

In the received order it sits between Small Gains and Balance. The order is not alphabetical or random: the old commentary reads it as a chain, one situation giving rise to the next.