Ji Fei made calendars the way other men mended roofs: with callused hands and a patient eye for seams. His workshop sat at the end of a narrow lane, its lintel bowed with years and its window always fogged where steam from the teapot met the cold. People in the town called him “the man who knows the days.” He liked the name; it was less pompous than “astrologer” and less blasphemous than “priest.” He preferred to say he simply read the map the heavens had left for men.
When Ji Fei was a child his father had given him a brittle almanac and a single, careful instruction: the sky has its orders and people have theirs, and the two are not the same thing. The boy learned the book’s lists—month by month, which days wore the label “do not,” which favored wheels of commerce, which were for weddings, which for mourning. The old names stuck in his mouth: the “yin-error” days, twelve in a year—Gengxu in the first month, Xinyou in the second, Gengshen in the third—and their companions, the “yang-error” days—Jiayin in the first month, Yimao in the second, and so on. To townsfolk these were cautions written by the elders; to Ji Fei they were part of a system that once kept harvests from failing and temples from toppling. He never treated them like charms. He taught people to use the calendar as a tool, not a talisman.
Most requests that found him were practical. A marriage, the first ploughing, the moving of a child’s bed: neighbors slid problems across his bench like coins and waited for an answer. Ji Fei would consult his charts, weigh the elements, and offer days for acting or days for waiting. He did not enjoy being asked for omens and he resented having his work treated as superstition. Still, he recognized a simple truth: if a farmer avoided a storm season to sow, he lost nothing. If a merchant chose a favorable day to open a shop, he risked less. The calendar, to him, was risk-management given an old face.
A rich man from outside the valley—Mr. Ruan, who owned layered fields and a prideful storehouse—arrived one autumn and wanted a small warehouse built to shelter new silk and rice. He sent an overseer to Ji Fei. “We will begin on the eighth day of the tenth month,” the overseer said, thumbing a ledger. “It is convenient. Note it.”
Ji Fei looked at his charts and felt the same small tightening he did when a maker reads a cracked plank. The ledger’s day was a column of crosses: the month’s earthly branch clashed with the year’s, and the heavenly stem offered no harmony. Two elements would be in opposition that day—what the old teachers called a “yang-break-yin-clash,” the sort of alignment country sages warned could upset more than timber and tile.
“Choose another day,” Ji Fei said. He said it as a craftsman might refuse a warped beam: gently, firmly. “There is one next week that will spare you the clash.”
The overseer laughed the laugh of men with ledgers: short, quick. “We have hired the men. We have the timber. Your charts are only words. Move the date and the world moves with it.”
They began on the elected day. The sky that afternoon seemed ordinary until it was not. Clouds gathered fast, not the soft drifting kind but a driving, blade-edge band. Rain fell in sheets, as if someone ripped the sky’s covering. The half-finished roof soaked; old joints swelled and shifted. Two laborers slipped from the scaffolding. They did not die, but one would never hold a trowel with the same steadiness again.
When Mr. Ruan’s overseer returned to Ji Fei, flushed more with anger than grief, he said, “You should have told us the day was dangerous. If you had, we would have delayed.”
Ji Fei felt both the sting and the uselessness of apology. “I told you what I saw,” he said. “The sky’s ways are different from our wishes. A man can read the signs, but he cannot command rain.”
In the town the incident cut the people into two opinions. Some said it showed how truthful the old days still were; others, mostly young and impatient, scoffed that the calendar was a book of excuses, a way for failure to be blamed on distant things. Ji Fei kept his hands on his work and his face like the back of a well-used almanac: lined but not unkind.
Months later, Mr. Ruan asked Ji Fei again—this time about moving a family chest of heirlooms into safer boxes. “We must do it on the date of the twelfth month,” the overseer explained. “It will be quick.”
Ji Fei checked his tables. The twelfth month indeed bore a name that to his teachers meant unease: certain stems and branches were in friction; the very day was one that tradition called unfit for many affairs. He suggested waiting. They did not. In the act of carrying the chest over the threshold, an old servant—frail and steady for years—clutched his chest and fell. They took him to the physician at once. He lingered, then slipped away.
Mr. Ruan’s household attended the small funeral with eyes like wet straw. The overseer, who had once laughed, now stood at Ji Fei’s door and said nothing that mattered. “If you had said a month earlier, I would have listened,” he murmured, half to Ji Fei and half to himself. “We thought the days were excuses.”
People cannot put a dead servant back into his bed by rearranging dates. They can only listen, later, and perhaps move with more care.
One winter, a scholar came through town: thin, bearded, with a satchel of rolled notes and a habit of tapping the rim of his cup as if reasoning would drip out in rhythm. He said he had been to the capital, read the books of Zou Yan and others—told stories of men who fused the movements of the stars to laws of history. He spoke of a man named Zhang, who built instruments to measure the heavens rather than merely observe them by eye. The scholar’s words were not simple superstition or zeal; they were argument and apology and a kind of humility. “We ought to measure and then interpret,” he said. “Prediction should have a test and a tally. Otherwise we trade sense for comfort.”
Ji Fei listened. In the scholar’s combination of instrument and idea, he detected a hand lifting a fine seam. He had always believed that the calendar ought to be useful, that the lists of “do not” could protect the weak from chance if used wisely. The scholar suggested a sturdier approach: where possible, measure; where you cannot, warn; never let warning become a shield against acting well.
The seasons after that were lean. A drought came like an old debt—slow at first, then sweeping the riverbeds dry—and with it disease. Families lost cattle, then people. Fuel and grain were hoarded in pockets like secret prayers. The town remembered Ji Fei not for prophecy now but for the practical changes he made. He begun marking his almanacs with more than omens: water-saving practices, when to store seed, how to rotate fields, what to do if fever spread. He taught the few willing to listen how to move grain away from damp places and how to keep wells from standing stagnant. That care saved more lives than any single “auspicious” date had.
When Mr. Ruan’s overseer came back years later, humbled and quieter, he brought the two boys of the household. He placed the almanac between their hands on Ji Fei’s bench and said, “We were foolish. Teach them not to be as we were.”
Ji Fei showed them the charts while he told them another kind of lesson: the calendar was a map of tendencies, not a sovereign. “It points,” he said, “but your feet must still walk. There are days to beware and days to seize. The map does not give you courage. People do.”
So he taught both: how to read the stems and branches and how to mend a roof quickly when the weather turned. He taught that charts amplified prudence and that prudence mingled with action produced safety.
He aged like a ledger, slowly and with small, neat changes. The town’s young men called him old-fashioned, the elders still came for his counsel. When he could no longer tie the string of a new almanac, he would sit by the window and watch the children kick a bottle along the lane. He liked to think the world folded itself in predictable ways and unpredictable ones simultaneously—an algebra of weather and human error.
On his last morning he took the brittle almanac his father had left him and pressed it to his chest. A small group of townspeople had gathered at his door—those who had been children when he first set his shop’s sign, a few who had been helped by his sensible records. Someone asked if he had a final counsel for them.
Ji Fei’s eyes, mild and still clear, wandered over the faces. He smiled without humoring them. “Do not turn the map into a cage,” he said. “Learn the rules the heavens give and the craft that makes life livable. The world is not only the sky’s law nor only our will. Balance is what keeps both from breaking.”
Then his hand fell, like the last line of ink on a page. People carried him to his grave, and afterward there was talk for a while about his advice. A few took the old charts to study the stem-and-branch names with new attention. Others rethought their haste. The town had not been transformed into a community that always obeyed the almanac; it became, quietly, a town that used it.
Years later, children in that lane still played near a crooked lintel. They would sometimes come to the window of the old workshop and find a new almanac laid on the bench—Ji Fei’s handwriting taught into the neat hands of his apprentices. The book listed the “yin-error” and “yang-error” days—those ancient cautions remained—but on the margins someone had added instructions: where to store water, where to shelter flocks, how to carry a plank safely. The calendar offered more than fate then; it offered preparation.
And when a storm came, or an odd fever, the people found themselves less likely to cast blame on a day. They checked the chart, of course. Then they did what hands and hearts could: fixed the roof, fed the hungry, and taught the young to carry things with care. The heavens kept its courses; people kept theirs. Balance, as Ji Fei had said, had become a small, stubborn art.
