The Unregretted Move

At 11 p.m., Lin Zhi opened the mini-program called “Heart & Universe” for what felt like the hundredth time. The queue message popped up: “1,247 people ahead of you. Estimated wait time: 28 minutes.” She placed her phone beside her pillow, as usual, and went back to polishing her PowerPoint deck.

This was her third time this month queuing for the “Life K-Line” feature. The first time was before a project bid — the system drew a sharp upward green line, annotated “Career peak, strike while the iron is hot.” She won that contract. The second time, she had a hunch about her boyfriend’s suspicious behaviour; the K-line for “Relationships” plunged off a cliff, and the comments section was flooded with “Run!” She didn’t run. Last week, he confessed.

Now she wanted to see what the chart would draw for her career leap — resigning to start her own business.

Her phone buzzed — her turn was up. She entered her birth details, selected the “Career” dimension, and tapped generate. Three minutes later, a hundred-year K-line chart filled the screen. The cell for 2026 read: “Consolidating at bottom, gathering momentum.” And in 2040, a towering bullish candle appeared, annotated: “Life’s main upward wave.” She took a screenshot, hesitated for two seconds, then sent it to her work group chat: “What do you guys think of this trend?”

A colleague replied instantly: “Since when did you start believing in this stuff?”

She stared at that message for a long time, the glow of the screen reflecting on her face. When had it started? Probably from the very first moment it felt “accurate” — that rush of certainty was addictive, as if she held a map of her life in her hands, with turn-by-turn navigation at every step.

But she forgot that navigation could also lead you straight into a dead end.

In Pingyuan there lived a man named Guan Lu, who was said to understand the language of birds and the art of yin-yang divination. He always wore a faded blue robe and set up his fortune-telling stall under a mulberry tree. He took money if offered, but never minded if not. Some called him an immortal; he would just smile and say, “I only see a little more than others.”

One day, a young man named Zhao Yan came to him. His face was handsome as jade, but a grey mist seemed to hang over his brows. He sat down before Guan Lu and said, “Sir, I have a feeling my life will not be long.”

Guan Lu glanced at him, and his divining stalks paused for a moment. Zhao Yan’s brow was dark, his philtrum short, and a faint horizontal line crossed the bridge of his nose — all signs of a shortened lifespan, three years at most.

“You’re right,” Guan Lu did not hide it. “You have a calamity at nineteen.”

Zhao Yan’s face went pale. He was silent for a long time, then spoke in a hoarse voice: “Can you save me, sir?”

Guan Lu put away his stalks and shook his head. “The Book of Life and Death is in the hands of the South Dipper and the North Dipper. I cannot change it.”

Zhao Yan knelt down, his forehead touching the wooden board of the stall, and said nothing.

Guan Lu looked at him and let out a long sigh. “Very well — go home and prepare a jar of fine wine and a piece of dried venison. On the day of the Rabbit, go to the wheat field outside the city. At the southern end there is an old mulberry tree, and beneath it two men will be playing chess. Place the wine and meat before them. Do not speak; just keep filling their cups. If they ask you anything, kowtow and say nothing else.”

Zhao Yan looked up: “Those two men… who are they?”

“Just go,” Guan Lu said.

At dawn on the Rabbit day, Zhao Yan set out with his wine and venison. The wheat field was a lush green, and the old mulberry tree spread its crown like a great canopy. Beneath it sat two men. One was fair-faced and beardless, wearing a dark robe, frowning over a black stone in his hand; the other had a lean, clear-featured face, clad in a crimson robe with silver cloud patterns embroidered on the sleeves. The go board lay on the ground, its nineteen lines intersecting in silence, each stone placed without a sound.

Holding his breath, Zhao Yan set the wine jar and venison beside the board, then knelt, took the jug, and began to pour for the two players.

The man in dark placed a stone, not raising his head: “Who are you?”

Zhao Yan kowtowed and remained silent.

The man in crimson lifted his cup, sniffed it, and laughed: “Good wine. Since we’ve taken his offering, we ought to give him something in return.” He leaned over to look at the ledger before the dark-robed man. “Zhao Yan… nineteen years old… oh, this one shouldn’t die. You made a mistake.”

The dark-robed man frowned: “The record is fixed.”

“Let me see it.” The crimson-robed man reached out. The other hesitated, then handed over the ledger. He took it, drew a vermilion brush from his sleeve, and added a stroke beside the character for “nineteen,” turning it into “ninety.”

“Done.” He closed the book and waved at Zhao Yan. “Go back. You have seventy more years to live.”

A gentle breeze brushed Zhao Yan’s face, and when he opened his eyes again, the space under the tree was empty. Only the wine jar remained, half full, and the venison missing a slice.

He stumbled back to the city and found Guan Lu at his stall, breathless: “Sir, who were those two men?”

Guan Lu was leafing through a yellowed copy of the I Ching. He looked up, his gaze calm. “The one in dark was the North Dipper — he governs death. The one in crimson was the South Dipper — he governs life. The South Dipper inscribes life; the North Dipper erases it. You met the South Dipper, so your fate was changed.”

Zhao Yan stood frozen, touching his own face. He could not see his own complexion, but he felt a grounding certainty he had never known before — as if something heavy had settled back into his chest.

“Sir,” he asked, “can fate truly be changed?”

Guan Lu put down the book and gazed at the green waves of wheat swaying in the distance. For a long while he said nothing. Finally, he spoke softly, as if to himself: “A move once made is not regretted — but the board is always shifting.”

Zhao Yan left, only half understanding. After that, he did indeed live safely past nineteen, married, had children, and became a minor official. Yet he always remembered Guan Lu’s last words — the board is always shifting. Sometimes he wondered: if he had not gone to that mulberry tree that day, if the South Dipper had not opened that ledger, if the North Dipper had not hesitated… would the board have looked any different?

But he never found an answer. He simply lived more earnestly than before, getting up early each morning to water the mulberry tree in his yard.

Lin Zhi stumbled upon the story of the “North Dipper erases life” at two in the morning. She had just quit her job and was running the “Heart & Universe” mini-program over and over to calculate her entrepreneurial fortune. Each time, the K-line came out differently — sometimes a steady upward bull market, sometimes a cliff-diving bear market. The more she checked, the more anxious she grew; the more anxious she grew, the more she needed to check — until her phone died, and her own face stared back at her from the dark screen.

She thought of that young man, Zhao Yan. If he were alive today, he would probably open some “Life K-Line” app, enter his birth details, and watch an AI mark the endpoint of his life with green and red bars — and then what?

Guan Lu told him to bring wine to the mulberry tree, and the South Dipper changed his fate. But in reality, there was no South Dipper, no vermilion brush, no wine or venison. There was only a queue of 1,247 people and a K-line chart that changed by the minute.

She opened her laptop and started a new document — her first business plan after resigning. She thought for a long time about the title, and finally wrote five Chinese characters: “My Own Script.”

But as she wrote, she stopped again. The cursor blinked on the screen, and she suddenly remembered that beside the “Life K-Line” feature in “Heart & Universe” there was a line of small text she had never noticed before —

She stared at that line for a long time, then smiled. She took a screenshot, posted it on her social feed, and captioned it:

The comments exploded. A colleague said, “You’ve seen the light.” Her ex-boyfriend left a single full stop. And a university classmate who had harboured a quiet crush for years sent a private message: “Free for coffee tomorrow?”

She replied with one word: “Sure.”

Then she turned off her phone and went back to writing that business plan. Outside the window, the sky was slowly brightening. It was spring in 2026; the wheat fields were not yet green, but the seeds were already in the soil.

The wind still blows across the wheat fields, though the mulberry tree has long withered. Guan Lu’s stall has vanished into the dust of history. Only those words remain — “A move once made is not regretted, but the board is always shifting” — like a stone placed on the nineteenth line, waiting for someone to pick it up and set it down anew.

The game is not over. Every stone you place rewrites the ending.