Gen Palace

The nine palaces are the ground layer of a chart — what the terrain is worth to the question being asked: the environment, the living space, the compass direction, and the part of the body that answers to it. Gen takes the Northeast and belongs to Earth. Its trigram is solid on top with two broken lines beneath, a bowl turned upside down. The image is the mountain, and a mountain does not move, stops whatever wanted to come through, and holds what has been put behind it. The word it gathers into is stillness. Gen is also the palace of the threshold — the doorstep, the flight of steps, the junction, the line where one thing ends and the next begins. And it owns a seam in the year: the weeks in which winter hands over to spring.

• Places and settings: anything raised, walled in or piled up — mountains and hills, rockeries and terraces, embankments, mountain tracks and narrow paths; city walls and boundary walls, tall buildings, warehouses and storerooms, bank vaults; and prisons, police premises, ancestral halls and temples, graveyards, mines and quarries. Gen also governs the places where one thing meets another: thresholds, steps, junctions and boundaries.
• People and matters: children and adolescents, heirs, relatives. People who work with earth and stone — builders, miners, masons. People whose job is to guard a way in — security staff, gatekeepers, prison officers. And those who live apart: mountain monks and recluses, solitary people, and people who like to put things by.
• Body: the nose, the back, the fingers and toes, the joints, and the spleen, stomach and colon.
• Season: Gen governs the handover from winter to spring — the twelfth lunar month into the first, the stretch between the start of spring and the waking of the insects.

Two systems of body correspondence sit side by side here, and it is worth knowing which one you are using. One is the set of organs the trigram itself governs — nose, back, joints, spleen and stomach. The other is the spatial projection that lays a body across the nine palaces by direction, and in that one the Gen cell stands for the left leg. Settle which system is in play before taking a body part off the chart.

Nature

Self-possessed and steady, with real care given to where the boundaries are. Nothing arriving from outside is accepted at face value; the person involved runs it past themselves first. When something changes, the first move is not to react but to stop and have a look at it.

Style

Confirm the direction is right before moving, and be genuinely able to stop when stopping is what the situation calls for. One thing at a time suits the person involved better than many, and the number of people in the room is not what they are counting. When the environment gets chaotic, the energy is deliberately pulled back in rather than spent.

Strength

Staying power and self-management, and a talent for setting rules and drawing lines. The person involved can take one subject a very long way down during a long stretch of working alone, which makes research, planning and management the roles that fit — all of them jobs that need someone who does not rattle.

Impression

Calm, quiet, and clearly working to a set of principles, with a presence about as movable as a hillside. Not much is said, and a good deal of respect comes back anyway: the person involved reads to others as someone there is no point trying to shift.

Pitfall

The walls go up and stay up. Change gets resisted until the moment to adjust has passed, losing control is avoided by not moving at all, and stillness quietly turns into hiding. Given long enough, what the person involved ends up with is not stability but stalled ground, and nobody standing on it with them.

For a dwelling, this palace supplies two things: what the whole building looks like when the Earth of Gen is strong and when it is weak, and which kinds of place out in the surrounding environment belong to Gen.

• When the energy is strong: the four walls are true and even, the building is dignified and solemn, and the roads around it are wide.
• When the energy is weak: much of it is collapsing or sunken.
• Places in the wider environment that belong to Gen: hill country, uplands, raised terraces and embankments; warehouses and storerooms, banks, tall buildings and city walls; ancestral halls, temples and graveyards; prisons, police premises and station houses; and mines and quarries.

The strong-and-weak description is a verdict on the whole building rather than on any one room, and the list of places is a category of outdoor environment. At the level of the nine palaces there is still no table saying which room of a house each palace answers to.

When the indicator lands in this palace, the direction you take is Northeast. This mapping is fixed and does not vary by matter.