Chapter 7030

María Lin stared at the nine copper coins, growing ever more astonished. She had never before encountered such an ambiguous, half-and-half result. Of the nine coins, four landed heads up in the Life Gate positions, another four in the Death Gate positions, and the crucial ninth coin fell exactly between life and death.

This “life-or-death” placement did not refer solely to that single coin; when viewed together with the four Life Gate coins, the five could form the pattern of a Life Gate hexagram. Yet if combined with the four Death Gate coins instead, they could just as clearly form a Death Gate hexagram.

It was like two warring nations producing a child of mixed lineage, whose allegiance could tip the scales. If the child took its father’s nationality, it would become the enemy of its mother’s land—and vice versa.

Having studied divination for hundreds of years, María Lin had never seen anything so perplexing. Silently, she snatched up the nine coins and threw them again. Though their positions and orientations shifted completely, her second reading yielded the exact same conclusion.

Charlie saw her brow remain furrowed and could not help asking, “Miss Lin, what does the hexagram show this time?”

María Lin shook her head. “It’s unchanged.”

Charlie exclaimed in surprise, “I recorded every coin’s position and face the first time. Now each coin’s position and face have all changed—why is the result the same?”

She smiled serenely. “Young Master studied feng shui in the Nine Profound Heaven Tome, but that text never covered divination. Hexagrams are not read from mere appearances but through their own native logic. On the surface, the two throws seem unrelated, yet their underlying model yields an identical outcome.”

Charlie mused, “So the Nine Profound Heaven Tome truly contained no advanced divination techniques.”

María Lin explained, “Divination’s mystery lies in its foundational logic—akin to simulation software. Since you now work in automotive design, you know modern crash tests can be simulated in software without real crashes. The software fixes Earth’s physics as constants; you simply input a vehicle’s weight, speed, materials, crash angle, impact object, and so on to predict the outcome.”

“When I cast coins, I rely on the Book of Changes’ Eight Trigrams. Without computers, the ancients observed over centuries to grasp the universe’s underlying logic, then created the Eight Trigrams. Its core of yin and yang is essentially the earliest binary system—just like 0 and 1 in computing. Casting coins is binary too: heads or tails.”

“These nine coins act like nine key parameters in a simulation. Feeding them into the Book of Changes ‘software’ lets one foresee an event’s trajectory, outcome, and variables. As long as reality follows the universe’s operating model, the divination remains accurate. Though each throw rearranges coin face and position, the reason for using nine coins is that no single coin matters; only their nine–way relationship does. Whether scattered on a table, strewn in a room, or across a courtyard, the result stands.”

The Book of Changes was no feudal superstition but the Way made simple. Zeroes and ones build a virtual computer world; yin and yang shape all things.

Yet few on Earth truly master the Book of Changes’ logic and can simulate with nine variables—María Lin believed she might be the only one.

Having the same result twice confounded her. Both Stephen Thompson and his mastermind lay in the Death Gate; Duncan Li belonged to the Life Gate; and Charlie himself, naturally, was also Life Gate. So who was the one hanging in the balance?

Puzzled, María Lin told Charlie, “Young Master, please be patient. Give me some time to trace their connections. As soon as I have an answer, I will inform you at once.”

Charlie nodded gently. If Duncan Li needed years—or even three to five years—to track them down, no one could expect instantaneous results. With that, he rose to leave.

Back at Thompson First Villa, everything was as Claire had shown him via video—furniture untouched, rooms just as he’d left them. Yet the letter Claire had left still lay on the bedside table.

Charlie opened it, rereading her heartfelt words. Tears blurred his vision. Six years of marriage had finally found stability, only to be shattered at their happiest moment.

Surrounded by reminders of Claire in this home, he felt more desolate than ever. After hesitating, he pocketed her letter and left Thompson First Villa.

Alone in that vast residence felt unbearable. So he went instead to the semi–mountain villa at Champs-Élysées Hot Spring, craving solitude—three to five days, perhaps even a month.

He then messaged Duncan Li and María Lin on WeChat: if they found any news, call him immediately. As for WeChat itself, he decided to go offline, whitelisting only their numbers and blocking all other calls and messages.

María Lin saw his message and knew he needed time alone to process Claire’s departure. Worried he might fall into despair or mired in longing, she instructed Old Zhang and the household not to disturb him. She, too, would work alone to unravel recent events and determine which variable truly held the key.

She set up a go board, placed a single black stone at its far left, and murmured, “All causes have origins. That origin must lie at Qingzhao Nunnery on the frontier of the Ten-Thousand Mountains.”