Tortoise-Back Hidden Miscellany

"Gui Cang San Shuo" is a full-length novel built around the scattered ancient Book of Changes. The story begins with a handwritten copy of "Gui Cang Chu Jing Ji Yi," annotated by Xue Zhen and compiled and collated by Ma Guohan. It tells how "I," in Luoyan Village in Heshun County, Jinzhong, together with Old Qin, my father Wang Tianshun, Old Feng, the carpenter Chen, and other neighbors, gradually brought the ancient lines of divination—such as "its speech is sincere," "for celebration the body does not move," and "a bird is about to arrive, lowering its wings"—to life in the daily details of repairing roads, drawing water from wells, nursing injuries, settling boundary disputes, and protecting the mountains.

Qin Kuan, once a peddler, moved from quarrelsome talk to standing guard over the road with a cane; the father interpreted the virtue of Kun through silence and labor; Old Feng used an old mirror to reflect the movements of heaven and earth.

The blank spaces where the scriptures were fragmentary were quietly filled in by the ordinary lives of birth, aging, sickness, death, speech, silence, and action. Through the study of textual reconstruction and the years spent in the mountain village, the novel slowly reveals the philosophical foundation of Gui Cang: all things return and are hidden within it, and the hexagrams are not for divination, but for living.