Force

Great power, freshly available.

The situation

You have the strength to break through. That's exactly why the boundary matters more than usual now.

What it asks of you

Restrain the use of it. Power spent carelessly is how position gets lost.

Where it leads

The six lines

1. initial Strength in the toes. Set out on that and it turns — and you were sincere about it. 壯于趾，征凶，有孚
2. second This holds. 貞吉
3. third The small man uses force; the better man uses the net. The ram butts the hedge and gets his horns caught. 小人用壯，君子用罔。貞厲。羝羊觸藩，羸其角
4. fourth This holds and the regret goes. The hedge opens, nothing is caught. Strength in the axle straps of a big wagon. 貞吉悔亡。藩決不羸，壯于大輿之輹
5. fifth Losing the sheep in the open country, easily. No regret. 喪羊于易，无悔
6. top The ram is caught in the hedge and can go neither back nor on. Nothing comes of it — but stay with the difficulty and it turns out. 羝羊觸藩，不能退，不能遂。无攸利，艱則吉

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 001111 — 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 Retreat. 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 Retreat and Emergence. The order is not alphabetical or random: the old commentary reads it as a chain, one situation giving rise to the next.