Adjusting for a Child: A Worked Case

Translator's note. A complete worked case in the remedy layer: a woman who had not conceived in thirty years, a chart, and four levers — the hour pillar, the day master, the direction of travel, and food. Two things make it worth reading even for a sceptic. The first is the precondition: nothing here is claimed for a body with a physical fault. The second is the story of the woman herself, who conceived at fifty after a divorce moved her several hundred kilometres — the case that the author uses to argue that a change of place can matter more than a change of medicine.

Every method in this archive has a precondition, and this one states it bluntly. Before anything is adjusted, the machinery on both sides — the reproductive system, in plain language — has to be in working order. If the machinery is faulty, no adjustment will produce a child. Everything that follows applies only to couples whose machinery is sound and who are nonetheless not conceiving.

The two targets

The primary target is the hour pillar, because the hour pillar is the children's palace. The secondary target is the output star (食伤, shishang) — the eating god and the wounding officer — which is where children are positioned in the ten-god scheme.

The order matters, and the author is emphatic about why. If you attend only to the output star and never to the hour pillar, no child appears; or a child appears and dies. Producing a pregnancy is not the goal. Producing a healthy child — at the very least an ordinary, functioning person — is the only outcome that counts. A child who is born disabled or impaired would have been better not born, and the author says so directly, while conceding that the final choice belongs to the parents. Hence: hour pillar first, output star second.

For a woman there is a third requirement, and it outranks the other two. The day master itself must be sound. If the day master is not carrying strong favourable energy, there is no reliable pregnancy and no protection against miscarriage. A woman can have a perfectly adjusted hour pillar and still lose the child, because the vessel that has to hold the pregnancy was never strengthened.

Whose chart is read

The woman's. The man's is consulted and may be set aside entirely. The reasoning is not metaphysical: a child is carried and delivered by the mother, and the question the remedy sets out to answer is whether this woman will bear a child — not whose child it is. Where the woman conceives, the adjustment has done its work.

So the full prescription for a woman is: day master made favourable, hour pillar made favourable, and — where the means allow — the output star as well. That is the ordinary method.

Does an adjusted hour pillar always produce a child?

No, and the reason is a matter of accounting. The hour pillar carries a fixed quantity of energy. If that energy has already been spent — if the favourable element in the hour pillar has been drawn down over a lifetime of use — the result of adjustment will be modest. If it has not been spent, a small adjustment produces a pregnancy quickly. This is why a change of residence or a change of direction can make a woman conceive who had not conceived in decades: the pillar did not change, but what was left of it did.

The woman who conceived at fifty

In the county town where the author then worked, a businessman's wife had married at seventeen or eighteen and had never conceived. By fifty the marriage had ended — the husband had kept another woman and had a son by her. The wife left, and became the companion of a company manager in a different city.

Within a short time people noticed she was gaining weight. She assumed a tumour and went for a scan. She was pregnant, at fifty, after thirty years of not conceiving.

Two things had changed, and neither was medical. Her direction of travel had changed: she had lived west of the ancestral grave and now lived to its south-east. Her dwelling had changed. Under this system neither is a coincidence; both are the same variable measured two ways. A couple who do not conceive in one house may conceive within a year in another. Where the machinery is sound, the author insists, conception is a simple problem, and it does not require medication or any of the other things people spend money on.

The mechanism he proposes is stark: a woman whose body is full of the energy of children will conceive; a woman whose body is not will not. Every woman has an hour pillar and an output star, but by the time she wants a child that energy may be spent — too little to carry a pregnancy to term, hence miscarriage, or a child born impaired, or a child who dies. Energy is the root of every outcome in a life; strip the energy out and no account of a fate means anything.

The worked case

Female: 庚午 庚辰 戊申 庚申 Luck pillar: 丁丑 Year: 庚子

Reading: hour pillar 庚申. Day master 戊, which contains 辰 and 戌.

To produce a child, the hour pillar and the day master must both be made favourable. From the failure to conceive — or the miscarriages, or the children who died — one can work backwards to the environment: the 辰 and 戌 directions must have held hostile sand or hostile water, and the 庚 direction must have held hostile sand rather than favourable water. Every woman with this chart and that configuration either fails to bear children or bears a child who brings trouble. Hence the proverb the author quotes: better no child than a disaster of a child.

Planning the pregnancy year

Before conception the woman should choose the feng shui of the pregnancy itself: strong favourable energy in the 庚 direction and strong favourable energy in the 辰 and 戌 directions.

There is a fine distinction inside the hour pillar. The hour stem 庚 stands for the first child; the hour branch 申 stands for the second or the last. Where no first child exists there can be no second, so 申 is irrelevant for a first pregnancy — but it becomes equally important if twins or a second child are intended.

This also explains why twins differ so sharply. If the 庚 direction holds favourable water and the 申 direction holds hostile water, the first twin will be fine and the second will fare badly. Reverse the two and the woman may not conceive at all — but if she does, the second twin will be the good one and the first will be poor. One does not need to meet the twins to say which is which; the mother's chart and environment already say it. And once the correspondence between chart and environment is established, the adjustment stops being a guess.

For this woman, four characters must be brought into favourable condition: 庚, 申, 辰, 戌. At minimum, 庚 must be dealt with in the coming year, because the first pregnancy depends on the hour stem. Adding 申 covers the twin case.

The four levers

1. Feng shui. Bring 庚, 申, 辰 and 戌 into strong favourable condition.

庚 is the first priority: in the 庚子 year it is an unfavourable element (忌神, jishen), and the more unfavourable it is, the more thoroughly it must be converted into strong favourable energy. 戊 — that is, 辰 and 戌 — is the second priority, because the day master must be sound.

In this year nothing else obstructs conception. Both the output star and the hour stem are unfavourable, and both directions hold hostile sand or hostile water. Two outcomes follow: no child, or a child who is a liability.

2. Direction of travel. 乙 and 丑 are the only choices for a good child this year.

The reasoning is the standard pair of moves for an unfavourable element: combine it, or store it. 乙 combines with 庚, and because the energy of a direction exceeds the energy of a time, one 乙 direction can neutralise four 庚. Whether she moves a hundred kilometres or several thousand, the single 乙 covers all of them. 丑 is the metal storehouse: it takes 庚 in and locks it away. Move to 丑 for a year and conception follows.

Go anywhere else and a child may still arrive — with trouble attached. This is why women with identical charts bear children of entirely different quality, and why twins, once grown, do not produce comparable families: their directions of travel diverge.

The other directions are worse than neutral. 甲 is hostile to conception outright. This is not a matter of “avoid the north”; it is one specific direction that fails and two that work.

3. Diet. Favour 子 foods. Avoid metal-element foods, avoid 辰 foods (shellfish), and keep 丑 foods (beef) to a minimum.

• Metal-element foods: avoid. Metal is the unfavourable element; all of it goes.
• Shellfish (辰): avoid. 辰 is earth and generates metal — it feeds the element you are trying to suppress.
• Fish (子): recommended. 子 water drains the metal.
• Beef (丑): sparing. 丑 stores the metal away, which is useful, but 丑 also combines with 子 and weakens water's control over 辰 and 申. Useful, therefore, but not in quantity.

This is where the method becomes falsifiable in an everyday way. If a woman truly cannot conceive, the author argues, one can infer her diet: she must eat shellfish and metal-element foods often. Had she not, she would have conceived long ago — even a troubled child would have arrived. That she cannot conceive even a troubled child is evidence about her table.

4. Clothing. Water element only.

• Metal: no. It is the unfavourable element.
• Fire: no — although it is favourable. This is the counter-intuitive one. Fire controls metal, so wearing fire means constantly provoking the metal, and provoked metal moves. Moving metal is precisely what prevents conception. A favourable element can still be the wrong tool.
• Earth: no. Earth generates metal.
• Wood: no. Wood is the officer star here; it predicts illness during pregnancy, or injury to mother or child at delivery.
• Water: yes. The single best choice for a good child.

5. Zodiac ornaments. Only 子 is favourable — and it carries a cost.

The rat is the only ornament that helps conception. The ox must not be worn: 丑 gathers the metal away, but it gathers the children away with it, into the ornament rather than into the body.

The rat works, and it strikes at the mother. 子 clashes with 午 in the year pillar, and 午 governs the mother. Wear a rat for a year and the mother begins to suffer inexplicable harms: a father who never raised his voice begins to bully her; a mother who never cut herself while cooking starts cutting her hands.

The author does not soften this. The world is not arranged so that a gain is free. To reach one target you pay somewhere else — and the payment is itself the proof that the ornament is working.

Questions

Can the sex of the child be adjusted? Not the question to ask first. Whether there is a child at all is the problem; sex selection is a deeper layer of analysis.

Is the origin point the woman's natal home? No. The origin is where she lives now.

She has had miscarriages. Does that change the calculation? It does not. The hour pillar governs the first child and the last child; once a first child is born there is always a last. Which is why, in the author's account, more children is often better than fewer.

Why the second child tends to do best

There is a coda here that is worth carrying away, because it is the kind of claim this system makes constantly: an explanation of a social pattern that costs nothing to check.

The hour stem aims its energy directly at the eldest; the hour branch aims at the youngest. Where the parents' hour pillar is unfavourable, that unfavourable energy is delivered to the two ends of the family and missed by whoever stands in the middle. Hence the second child escapes the bad transmission. Among high achievers, the author says, the second-born is over-represented — not because of birth order psychology, but because of which seat in the family the energy misses.

Whether or not one accepts the mechanism, the claim is at least of the right shape: specific, checkable, and wrong in an obvious way if the pattern does not hold.