Reality Programming Association

Chapter 93: Chapter 39: Trigram, Script, Tools for Evil

”This... This is just old-fashioned superstition!”

Wen Xiao didn’t look at Yu Xian, just stared at the potato chips on the floor.

”Yu Xian, don’t believe this! The whole ’Celestial Killer Lone Star’ thing... it’s just nonsense ancient people made up because they couldn’t explain probability! This must... it must be a coincidence!”

Yu Xian watched Wen Xiao. She was talking tough, but the hand clenched into a fist at her side was trembling slightly.

’She’s scared, too.’

’He couldn’t tell if she was scared for him, or for all the people who would be ’endangered by proximity.’’

”That’s enough, Wen Xiao.”

Yu Xian cut her off, bent down, picked up the bag of chips that had fallen on the floor, and placed it back on the table.

”Don’t get worked up. I’m fine.”

Compared to Wen Xiao’s panic, Yu Xian, the person at the center of it all, had actually calmed down. After the initial feeling of suffocation passed, reason took over again.

As a science student who regularly dealt with data and logic, he had to admit:

Shao Yiyi’s calculations, on the ”past” timeline, were almost 100% accurate.

If you treated fortune-telling as a function where the input was his birth data, the output almost perfectly fit the trajectory of his first twenty years of life.

So, regardless of whether the logic behind this algorithm was the Zhou Yi or statistics, it had a certain degree of credibility based on the current sample data.

When all the arrows shot point to the same bullseye, explaining it away as ”coincidence” is, in itself, an unscientific attitude.

So-called superstition might sometimes just be another scientific law that humanity hasn’t yet deciphered, much like the personification of natural phenomena centuries ago, like the ’Thunder God and Thunder Goddess.’

Wen Xiao had mentioned before that the Yi Jing Trigrams and the binary system share a fundamental logical connection. Maybe Shao Yiyi’s algorithm really had some validity to it.

”When things settle down, you’ll have to explain to me how you guys wrote your algorithm.” Yu Xian looked at the girl with the double buns, trying to keep his tone light.

”Who knows, maybe we could even publish a cross-disciplinary paper.”

Wen Xiao froze for a moment. She opened her mouth, but in the end, just nodded emphatically and bent down to start cleaning up the chip crumbs scattered on the floor.

The atmosphere in the lounge finally eased up a little.

Yu Xian glanced at Shao Yiyi with some confusion. The girl wasn’t gloating about being right, as she had before, nor did she seem relieved that the heavy topic was over.

The girl in the dinosaur pajamas was now curled up on the armchair, arms wrapped around her knees, chin resting on them. She stared silently out the window at the dark curtain of rain.

”Yiyi, what’s wrong?”

Wen Xiao seemed to have noticed her friend’s odd behavior as well. She threw the trash in the bin and walked over to give her a little push.

”Did you get spooked? Yu Xian doesn’t even care anymore, so what are you still hung up on?”

Shao Yiyi’s body stiffened. She slowly turned her head, her eyes filled with a vacant look.

”Something’s wrong...” she mumbled to herself.

”What’s wrong?” Yu Xian frowned, a sense of unease rising in him.

”The logic is wrong.” Shao Yiyi’s voice trembled slightly. She swallowed hard.

”Brother Cos, Xiaoxiao, didn’t I just say that I’ve been feeling like my skills are lacking and my faith is shattered? For the past few days, I felt like I couldn’t divine anything correctly.”

”Yeah, but wasn’t that because you thought you got Yu Xian’s fate wrong?” Wen Xiao asked, confused.

”But just now, he admitted it himself. All those things were real. His experiences and the trigram matched perfectly.” Shao Yiyi’s voice held a hint of a sob.

”Yes, it was very accurate.” Yu Xian didn’t understand either.

”But doesn’t that just prove how skilled you are? Even if the result was bad.”

”Then... here’s the problem.” Shao Yiyi looked up abruptly, her eyes filled with terror.

”If this result for you was correct, that proves my algorithm’s logic isn’t flawed, and the AI divination model Xiaoxiao developed doesn’t have a bug. So... that means the other thing it predicted could also be true.”

Yu Xian’s heart sank. He and Wen Xiao exchanged a glance, and he saw the same confusion and unease in her eyes.

”What else did you divine?” he asked in a low voice.

Shao Yiyi took a deep breath and pulled up an image on her phone. The date at the top was November 12th, that Monday.

”That afternoon, the school announced that classes were canceled. I was pretty happy about it, so I cast a trigram in my dorm since I had nothing better to do.” Shao Yiyi stared at the image.

”I wanted to see when this rain would stop, and then figure out how many more days off we’d get.”

”And what was the result?” Yu Xian couldn’t make sense of the image, so he had to ask.

”I... When I saw the result, my first reaction was the same as when I did your reading—that I must have gotten it wrong again. Because the result was too absurd. It completely defied common sense and the laws of nature.”

”Yiyi, what was the result?” Wen Xiao tightened her grip on the hem of her shirt.

Shao Yiyi lowered her head, her voice very soft as she recited two phrases, word by word:

”Endless days of tribulation; Land Sinking into the Sea for a time unknown.”

”Hey, what does that mean? Hurry up and tell us,” Wen Xiao said anxiously. Yu Xian didn’t understand the flowery language either.

”In the texts of the Iron Plate Divine Number, predictions about weather and seasons usually have a clear ’time limit,’ like ’the rain will cease in three days,’ or ’the clouds will part to reveal the sun.’ But this trigram...”

Shao Yiyi glanced at the torrential rain outside.

”Kan represents water. The trigram says that this rain... has no end.”

”No end?” Wen Xiao also looked out the window.

”How is that possible...? There’s a finite amount of water vapor, right? Energy has to run out eventually. How can a rainstorm... go on forever?”