Completion

Everything in place — for now.

The situation

You've arrived. The danger of arrival is assuming the work of holding it is smaller than the work of getting here.

What it asks of you

Anticipate the failure. Finish with the same care you started with.

Where it leads

The six lines

1. initial Dragging the wheel back, wetting the tail. Nothing goes wrong. 曳其輪，濡其尾，无咎
2. second The woman loses the curtain of her carriage. Don't chase it — in seven days it comes back. 婦喪其茀，勿逐，七日得
3. third It took the high ancestor three years to take the Devil's Country. Do not put small men to that kind of work. 高宗伐鬼方，三年克之。小人勿用
4. fourth The fine clothes have rags stuffed in them against the leak. Watchful all day. 繻有衣袽，終日戒
5. fifth The neighbour to the east slaughters an ox; the neighbour to the west makes a small spring offering — and actually receives the blessing. 東鄰殺牛，不如西鄰之禴祭，實受其福
6. top Wetting the head. Dangerous. 濡其首，厲

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 010101 — 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 Threshold. 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 Steps and Threshold. The order is not alphabetical or random: the old commentary reads it as a chain, one situation giving rise to the next.