Kan Palace

The nine palaces are the ground layer of a chart — what the terrain is worth to the question being asked. This layer covers the environment a matter sits in, the living space around it, the compass direction it points to, and the part of the body that answers to it. Kan takes due North and belongs to Water. Its trigram is solid through the middle with a broken line above and below, and everything it means gathers into a single word: peril. Water runs to the lowest ground — it finds a way in, and once it is in it does not easily get back out again. So this is the palace of low ground, dim light and things kept out of sight, and of the hard, busy, thinking-too-much work that goes on down there.

• Places and settings: anything touched by water — rivers, lakes and the sea, ditches, wells and springs, low-lying and marshy ground, and then bathrooms and bathhouses, hot springs, waterworks, fish ponds, cold stores and places that serve food and drink. It also covers space that is simply low, badly lit or deeply tucked away.
• People and matters: middle-aged men; people who earn a living with their minds, such as thinkers, inventors, mathematicians and calligraphers; people worn down by travelling for work. Confinement, flight and the drifting life outside settled society sit inside this trigram as well.
• Body: the kidneys and bladder, the urinary and reproductive systems, blood, the endocrine system and the circulation of body fluids. The ears and the anus belong to Kan too.
• State of things: strained, busy, heavy with thought, heavy with feeling, full of ideas. That mixture is the background colour Kan turns up in most often.

Peril describes a condition, not a verdict. The same Kan Palace reads one way on a question about research or patient, quiet work and quite another on a question about travelling or getting free of something. A palace carries no fortune of its own — what decides the reading is the matter it has been asked about.

Nature

Careful and finely tuned, with an unusually strong need to feel safe. The smallest shift in a room registers, and the worst version of events has already been thought through before anyone else notices there is anything to think about. What shows on the outside is composure; what runs underneath is an alarm the person involved never quite switches off.

Style

Look first, move second. Faced with something new the person involved defends rather than charges, and anything uncertain is held at a distance until it has been understood. Pressure does the opposite of what it does to most people: the worse the situation gets, the clearer the thinking becomes, and a way out is usually mapped before anyone has admitted one might be needed.

Strength

Judging risk and handling a crisis. The person involved stays steady in exactly the conditions that scatter everyone else, and has the patience for the long submerged stretch where nothing visible happens and the work is going deeper. Research, risk control, strategy and running an operation from behind the scenes are the roles that fit.

Impression

Cool, a little distant, not giving much away. Other people file the person involved under "thinks about things a long way down". Not easy to warm to at a first meeting; the reliability is the part that only comes out with time.

Pitfall

Once fear takes the wheel, nothing moves at all. Defence held too long becomes a list of chances never taken; feeling pressed down far enough for long enough turns into a low permanent anxiety; and a fear of failing hardens into the habit of routing around anything that could fail. What is left is an argument the person involved can neither win nor stop having, and none of it is visible from outside.

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

• When the energy is strong: the building is elegant and squarely built, with some pleasing variation in its levels, and reads as one coherent thing.
• When the energy is weak: the shape is off true, the heights do not agree with one another, and the whole property looks ragged.
• Places in the wider environment that belong to Kan: rivers, lakes and the sea, wells and springs, ditches, drains and low-lying ground; bathrooms and bathhouses, hotels, cold-drink shops, restaurants, fish ponds and aquariums; basements, dark rooms and other spaces that sit below the level around them.

Two things not to run together. The strong-and-weak description is a verdict on the whole building, not on any one room, and the list of places is a category of outdoor environment rather than anything indoors. 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 North. This mapping is fixed and does not vary by matter.