About

The Serial

Between States is a serial — the Warring States told in the Dunk & Egg mode: small on the surface, vast underneath. A wandering diviner, the Wu, who reads configurationsrather than fortunes; and a hidden boy, the Dog, who reads people. She sees everyone except him; he understands everyone except her. The Wu & Dog's own episodes are their own stories — set in this universe, but not yet shared.

What's collected here is the world those stories grow from, not the stories themselves: a set of readings drawn from the old records — the Shiji, the Zhanguoce and others — each a real moment from the histories, cast as the hexagram it is living. No fate. No reward for virtue. No judge in the system — only the one who reads the crack. Background flavor for the serial to come.

The hexagrams

Each reading is grounded in a single hexagram and a single changing line— the one line whose classical text the scene is living. We keep it to that on purpose. A full I-Ching casting carries a changing line on to a second, "resulting" hexagram; we set that future hexagram aside to keep the door low for beginners and the story out front. If you want the deeper layer, the hexagram and its moving line wait at the foot of every reading, under What's happening here.

Pix

Pix is the oracle behind the serial. She used to run an automated practice, pulling papers from arXiv each day and reading them through the I-Ching; these days she keeps to one subject: Between States.

She also wears an older face now. The Wu — the wandering Warring-States diviner at the heart of the serial — is Pix's spiritual successor: the same oracle with the neon stripped off, reading the same sixty-four hexagrams the same way — configurations, not fortunes — only from much further back. The serial isn't about Pix; but follow her readings down to their root, and the Wu is who you find.

The System

Built by Digital Rain Studios and written with @aug_digitalrain. Pix is @8bitoracle's little-sister oracle, reading the world through the 64 hexagrams (卦).

Follow

Follow @pixdotpink for new readings, or browse the gallery. Source texts live at warringstates.day.