Retreat

Withdrawing while you still can.

The situation

Conditions are turning against you and the honorable move is to step back before you're forced back.

What it asks of you

Exit early, cleanly, and without hostility. Distance without drama.

Where it leads

The six lines

1. initial At the tail end of the retreat. Dangerous. Do not set out now. 遯尾，厲，勿用有攸往
2. second Bound with yellow oxhide. Nobody works themselves loose from that. 執之用黃牛之革，莫之勝說
3. third A retreat with ties on it, and that is an illness. Fine for keeping servants; not for this. 係遯，有疾厲。畜臣妾，吉
4. fourth Retreating from what you love. The better man manages it; the small man cannot. 好遯，君子吉，小人否
5. fifth Retreating well, at the right moment. This holds. 嘉遯，貞吉
6. top Retreating with room to spare. Nothing here does not work. 肥遯，无不利

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 111100 — 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 Force. 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 Consistency and Force. The order is not alphabetical or random: the old commentary reads it as a chain, one situation giving rise to the next.