What Xiao Liu Ren is: six palaces, three counts

A ring of six, not a chart

Most Chinese methods reach an English-speaking reader already loaded with apparatus — eight characters, a hexagram, a board of positions with elements arguing with each other. Xiao Liu Ren asks you not to build anything but to walk. There are six positions in a fixed order and one rule: always forwards, never back. When you run past the sixth you wrap to the first and keep counting. There is nothing to weigh up and no table to memorise, which is precisely why the method could be carried around in someone's head.

That compactness sets its ceiling too. A method with six outcomes cannot say much in detail, so it aims instead at the coarser question a person usually actually has in hand: is this a moment to move, to hold still, or to leave alone? Anyone looking for a fine-grained account of their year should look at a different method, or better, at the situation itself.

The six palaces

The positions are called palaces (宫). They are not buildings and not places in the sky; the word is a traditional label for a station on the walk. In counting order, with the one-line reading this site gives each:

Great Peace 大安 — Everything stays as it is — and that is the good news.
Lingering 留连 — It is not finished, and it is not moving — it is waiting on something.
Swift Joy 速喜 — News is already on its way, and it is better than you expected.
Red Mouth 赤口 — Words are the danger here — yours and theirs.
Small Fortune 小吉 — Modest, real, and helped along by people who like you.
Empty Void 空亡 — The thing you are asking about is not really there.

The names and their sequence are stable across lineages. What is less stable is the set of correspondences hung on them — element, direction, spirit. Those differ between teachers, so the palace pages on this site follow the most widely published arrangement and say that they are one received reading rather than the only one.

What the count needs before it starts

Two things: a lunar date and a two-hour block. The site works the lunar date out from your own clock with a real calendar conversion — leap months, the solar terms that bound a lunar month and the sixty-day cycle all come from the calendar library rather than from an approximation. Three consequences are worth stating plainly.

Your clock, not Beijing's. The method counts the two-hour block you are standing in. A cast made in Berlin at nine in the evening is made in 亥, whatever hour it happens to be in China.
A leap month counts as the month it repeats. The leap sixth month is six, not seven. Counting it as a thirteenth month would break the wrap.
The day boundary is the one on your wall clock.子 runs from 23:00, so a cast made between eleven and midnight pairs 子 with the lunar date that is still showing. Traditions differ on which boundary ought to rule; the site does not quietly choose for you — the result prints the lunar date it used, so you can see exactly what was counted.

The three walks

You begin at 大安 Great Peace and walk the ring three times. Each walk starts wherever the previous one stopped.

To the month. One palace per lunar month, with Great Peace as the first. Month three therefore lands on Swift Joy — the third position, not the third position after Great Peace.
To the day. From the month's palace, count one palace per lunar day. The palace you are already standing on counts as the first day.
To the double-hour. From the day's palace, count one palace per double-hour, with 子 (23:00–00:59) as the first step.

Every step is inclusive, and that single fact is the whole difficulty of the method. Off by one and you get a plausible answer that is wrong, which is worse than an obvious error. The core here subtracts one before each wrap for exactly that reason, and a test walks all 4,320 combinations of lunar month, lunar day and double-hour rather than trusting the arithmetic to be obvious.

A worked example. Take lunar month three, lunar day five, and the hour 子. Month three is Swift Joy. Counting five days forward from Swift Joy, inclusively, lands back on Great Peace — Swift Joy is day one, Red Mouth two, Small Fortune three, Empty Void four, Great Peace five. Counting from Great Peace with 子 as the first step leaves the count where it is. The answer is Great Peace, and the two earlier landings explain how the count got there.

The three landings are not three answers

The casting page keeps all three stopping points and labels them Origin, Now and Landing. Only the last one answers the question. The month's palace says how the matter arose, the day's says how it is moving, and the hour's says where it stops. Reading the three as three separate verdicts is the most common way to use this method badly.

Because all three are on screen, two shapes are visible rather than argued about. When every walk lands on the same palace there is no hidden middle: the matter is what it appears to be. When the first and third agree while the middle differs, the middle is where the detour was. Both are patterns you can see for yourself rather than claims the site is making about your future.

Reading the palace you land on

This site summarises each palace in one of four states: open (Swift Joy, Small Fortune), steady (Great Peace),held (Lingering) and closed (Red Mouth, Empty Void). The label describes the moment, not the person. Open means the moment supports action; held means it is caught on something and pushing will not free it; closed means effort here tends to come back empty.

Underneath that, each palace page carries what the tradition says it favours, what it warns against, how it reads for timing, and the one thing worth doing. Those are prompts for reflection. In practice the useful sentence in a reading is often the one you disagree with, because disagreeing with it is how you find out what you already think.

The three-number variant

The calendar is optional. Three numbers can set the three walks instead: the first places the start, the second counts on, the third finishes. Because the ring has six positions, numbers that differ by six behave identically — 1, 7 and 13 are the same first step — so the numbers need no special range. Counting three handfuls of something and using the counts is as valid here as using a date, and the page gives the same reading either way.

What this is not

Xiao Liu Ren is not a forecast, and this site does not present it as one. Six outcomes cannot know anything you do not already know; a reading here is a way of making yourself state a question plainly and then look at it from three angles. It is offered for reflection and entertainment. Nothing on this site is medical, legal or financial advice, and no reading replaces a professional opinion on any of those. The question you type stays in your browser.

Where to go next

Cast a reading — the counting is done for you, and the page shows the three landings with the ring they came from. If you want the arithmetic and the vocabulary in one place, how the method works covers the same ground more compactly. The two companion guides explain the site's other traditions: how to cast the coin oracle and how to read the almanac.