Ep 05: Where Your Destiny Reveals Itself

Little Mouse reached the end of the street and spotted his father’s acupuncture stall amid the jumble of vendors. A few squat stools surrounded a collapsible plastic table. On it lay packets of needles, a glass bottle stuffed with cotton balls soaked in alcohol, and an enamel mug whose bright red stamp was deliberately turned outward. A scrap of cardboard served as the sign, the words handwritten in thick strokes: “Experienced Doctor from Trustworthy State Factory.”

Several patients sat waiting, coats loosened and hanging open, one arm extended with needles pricking from the flesh.

“Mom says dinner is ready,” Little Mouse said while glancing to either side of his father’s stall—to the right stood a fortune-telling desk; to the left, a grill sending up curls of lamb-scented smoke.

“Hmm,” the father replied in his usual ambiguous tone. With a slight flick of his left hand, he indicated that Little Mouse should wait. The boy pulled the tricycle aside and perched on its frame, watching his father drive a needle swiftly into a patient’s arm, then rotate it deftly to adjust the depth, until the tightness in the patient’s face dissolved into quiet relief.

The scent of lamb fat hissing over charcoal drifted toward Little Mouse, mixing with the clean, papery smoke of incense from a nearby Buddhist temple—a kind of enterprise only recently permitted to reopen. His stomach growled at the smell of meat, yet he suddenly felt exposed, as though desire itself were being watched.

“Hey, old master—how much for a fortune?” a man called out in dialect behind him.

“Five yuan,” the old man answered in Standard Mandarin, his voice crisp and unwavering. The moment he spoke, the marketplace noise seemed to recede, as though into another realm.

“That’s too much!” the man grumbled.

“If it’s not accurate, you don’t pay.”

Little Mouse turned and saw a Taoist seated at the stall behind him, clad in a black robe. A golden cap crowned his head, and his glossy black hair flowed down his back. Before him lay a bamboo cylinder of fortune sticks, a folding fan, a stub of pencil, and scattered slips of paper. Beside the table hung a weathered apricot-yellow cloth sign, marked with four bold characters: Xuan Wu Fortune Telling.

“Let me think about it. Will you still be here tomorrow?” the man asked.

“Hard to say,” the Taoist replied lightly. “We wander wherever the wind carries us. Only those bound by destiny meet us at the right time.” Then, noticing the man’s hesitation, he cast a glance at Little Mouse and suggested, “How about this—I’ll give the child a reading for free. You can see for yourself whether I’m worth it.”

The customer nodded. The elderly Taoist beckoned to Little Mouse, “Come closer, child. Tell me your date of birth—year, month, day, and the hour.” He paused. “The true solar time.”

After a moment’s hesitation, Little Mouse turned to his father to confirm the exact hour, then recited it. The old man raised his hand and began pinching his fingers as he calculated in silence. At last, he bent over the paper and wrote eight Chinese characters in two neat rows.

“This is Ba Zi, isn’t it?” the customer asked.

“Indeed. Both Eastern and Western systems of divination begin with the same premise—that a person’s fate can be read from the moment of birth.” The elderly Taoist kept his head lowered, pencil moving steadily across the page. “Ba Zi—‘Eight Characters’—is the Chinese method of predicting destiny by analyzing the year, month, day, and hour of birth.”

The customer leaned in, studying the chart. “Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, and Water…Yin, Yang…Mouse, Bull, Dragon, Snake, Pig… It’s so complicated!”

“It may appear so, but it is merely a system of relationships,” the Taoist replied calmly. “Every year, month, day, and hour has long been decoded and labeled by our extraordinarily smart ancestors. The instant a child is born, those four pillars combine into a set of Ba Zi. All we need to do is calculate.”

“Is it really as magical as people say?”

“If you pay close attention to the time of birth of everyone around you—family, friends, lovers, anyone who matters—you might begin to see a pattern: no one enters your life by chance.” The Taoist said, “In the language of Ba Zi, human connections follow a kind of destined chemistry. Who we are drawn to, and who we are meant to meet, seems written long before we arrive.”

“And how do you tell good fortune from bad?” the customer asked curiously.

“Each set of Ba Zi resembles a property—its location, layout, and construction indicate its natural strengths, its constraints, and what conditions would allow it to appreciate in value. That’s why, from this fixed combination, we can evaluate the person’s appointed childhood, luck, money, career, marriage, offspring, and even lifespan,” the Taoist said. “Also, one’s Ba Zi does not exist alone. It interacts with each passing moment, including this one. The label of every year, month, day, and hour is like a card in a deck: when conditions align in its favor, ‘the property’ gets better; but when adverse forces arrive, there could be a hurricane, a blizzard, a wildfire, or a tornado, and ‘the property’ might be damaged—even wrecked.”

He gestured for Little Mouse to step forward. “There’s nothing mystical about it—just calculations.”

Night was settling in. In the fading light, his father began removing the needles one by one as Little Mouse bent his head to watch the old Taoist’s pencil move swiftly across the paper.

“Here, at the Year—Yang Fire—serves as your ‘Orthodox Seal of Power,’ you must do very well in school.” The elderly man lifted his gaze and looked directly into the boy’s eyes as he spoke in a calm and absolute tone.

Little Mouse could hardly see what was on the paper. He gave a small nod, but inside he bristled, “My exam scores can be predicted? That’s absurd. I studied so hard to earn them.”

“Hmm… every ten years, a new life,” the Taoist murmured as he continued marking the chart. “Then you will arrive there…”

“Does everyone have this ‘new life every ten years’?” the customer asked.

“Yes. Like changing a stage set, every ten years the backdrop of your life completes a full cycle. Your surroundings shift, your circumstances turn. The people around you—those you love and those who love you—all change. Everything is calculable.” The elderly man lifted his head as he spoke.

His father had already begun collecting payment from the patients and loading the stools and other items onto the tricycle.

With his pencil, the elderly man circled one of the characters and said to Little Mouse, “What is less favorable is that you were born in the month of the Bull. From early January to early February—the coldest stretch of the Northern Hemisphere—it aligns with the latter half of Capricorn and the first half of Aquarius in Western astrology. The elemental climate of that time is below freezing, so the starting conditions of your life were…cold.” He tapped the paper lightly. “In your early years—including now—the path is meant to be difficult. This was a choice made before birth, by yourself.”

A sudden chill passed through Little Mouse, sharp and involuntary.

“There must have been a reason you arranged it so,” the old man continued, his tone firm, almost judicial. “In fact, on this very night, the first domino of your destiny begins to fall…the beginning of your becoming.”

“What’s a domino?” The unfamiliar word seized the full attention of Little Mouse.

“Also, you are likely to encounter a grave crisis in your thirties,” the old man said.

“A grave crisis in my thirties?” Little Mouse looked up and met the Taoist’s gaze. For a moment, their eyes held. The elderly Taoist spoke calmly. “But do not worry. Somewhere in your home—in some hidden corner—there is something that can save you.”

At that instant, the streetlights flickered on. A tall yellow lamp illuminated the cloth sign reading Xuan Wu Fortune Telling, its fabric fluttering in the wind like a current turning in unseen water.

“The Snake… hmm… a sign of movement and travel…” The elderly Taoist continued analyzing as his father mounted the tricycle and called out, “Time to go!”

As a final word, before vanishing into the gathering night, the Taoist prophesied to Little Mouse, “You will journey far from here, child—in a distant land, your future awaits.”

End of Episode

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