Lee Min-ho's SajuA Ship Anchored by the Iron Driven Into His BodyK-Drama · 1987-06-22

용신: 水

A deep current threw itself alone into a valley of roaring flame, and it winds on lighting the world, not even knowing that its own body is scattering into steam.

In the very middle of the season when the sun drives down hardest, with not one rock or handful of earth to lean on, you ran a thousand miles on nothing but the ember in your own chest — that momentum stands vivid before me. Others see only the brilliant blaze and call it splendid, but what I see first is the blue spring frozen cold on the inside from carrying that great fire alone. How could I call light the weight of a stride that took long wandering and pain full in the body and still refused to lose its own light? I will trace, one by one, the grain of the old questions and the unspoken wounds you came here carrying. Settle your heart quietly and listen.

Water Tiger — a ship anchored by the iron driven into his body

You are a lake risen alone on the parched ground of early summer — a Water Tiger day pillar. The Yang Water of your day master ought by rights to run wide and unhindered, but the season of your birth is high noon in the horse month, so a sea of fire blazes on every side of you. The Rabbit wood in your year branch and the Tiger wood in your day branch keep feeding that fire without pause, so within the six characters the only water is you yourself: an extremely weak chart. Yet a force being thin does not make the vessel small — you hold the wide frame of a Steady Wealth structure, one that takes the heat of a whole world into its own body and sends up vast steam.

Outwardly you look sociable, quick-witted, at ease with anyone, but deep in your inner life sits a strict yardstick you cannot bring yourself to speak of, and a perfectionism close to fastidiousness. On the surface you are a free spirit who enjoys an argument and loves opening a new game. In one corner of the chest, meanwhile, the caution of Steady Wealth has dropped anchor and will not permit a single slip. In the stems, Yin Fire and Yang Water form a bond, so you are soft toward affection, while Yang Fire and Yang Water strike each other fiercely — how could there be no conflict inside? That is exactly why you love people and are worn out by people, why you want to run out at the world and also want to bolt the door and hide inside silence.

Moreover your chart is layered with the Peach Blossom force that catches every eye, the Heavenly Noble Star that turns danger into opening, and the Literary Star that means bright wit. That you grew up with everyone's gaze on you from childhood, and that you came back from brutal storms as if by miracle and found your place again — both are owed to this shelter from heaven. Only, going on neglecting your own body while bending yourself to others' expectations wears you down and makes inner illness easy. You do not hesitate because you are weak — so do not try to shoulder so much responsibility alone.

The stage for your work is not a quiet desk with a book on it but a vast open field where tens of thousands of eyes are burning. The fine thing about your chart is that rather than being the spark itself, you are the wind and the mirror that make the world's fire rise higher. The force with which you pour out your craft and flair without holding back runs straight into blazing wealth and honour, so the road of popular art and acting was a garment that fit your given fate remarkably well.

You are a man who cannot breathe once he is shut inside a narrow set of rules laid down by someone else. In an organisation with an over-rigid system, or a place of constant interference, your invention suffocates. A fence you steer and lead yourself is far more comfortable. That you are never satisfied to recite the surface lines of a role but try to carve that person's bone and flesh into your own body also comes from the strong Wood force running through you.

The one problem is that when you choose a project you think so much that your feet grow heavy. This is not cowardice — inside you the Creative and Dynamic Wealth work together and press you with the demand that you produce something flawless, nothing to be ashamed of when it goes out into the world. The memory of the harsh severance and the lost roles around the age of twenty stayed as a scar in the unconscious, and it makes you tap the bridge several times over for every step you take. But keep piling kindling without lighting the fire for too long and you only scatter ash, so when the ground makes your chest race before your head has finished counting, you need to leap in boldly even if it is not quite ripe.

As for wealth: your chart has it piled up like a mountain, but the strength of your own body is thin, so carrying all of it is heavy work. This is the current called wealth overflowing while the body grows weary — the trouble is not that money does not come but that the wave coming in is so strong that mishandling it will injure your health and your mind. In the stems, the force of the honest reward of sweat and the force of a windfall that breaks all at once stand side by side, so the scale of the wealth you handle will be large and dazzling enough for the world to look up at.

Yet without keeping the substance it easily becomes water poured into a leaking jar. You are a man who by nature likes to give to those near him and to open things up on a large scale, so you often let go of the substance you ought to be holding in your own hand. You are built to miss the real gaps in a contract while intoxicated by outward splendour, or to suffer heartache over money dealings with someone you trusted. However endless the wealth looks from outside, a vague unease about when this sandcastle might fall has always been there in your chest.

So you must not let your mind be taken by liquid assets like cash or shares that slip through the fingers. When your own body is weak, the only way to live is to tie wealth down as land, as solid property, or as a qualification and a standing no one can take from you. Set down the ambition to turn and grow the money yourself, and put asset management in the hands of thoroughly proven professionals and systems to build a wall. Starting this month, what you must do at once is tidy the investment lines scattered about without need and narrow the channel down to the safest real assets.

In your chart the character that means a partner is the Fire force blazing brilliantly on every side. Steady Wealth and Dynamic Wealth show their faces side by side in the month and the year of your birth, so wherever you go the eyes that admire and follow you have never let up. That you stood under dazzling lights from your young days with all the attention of the opposite sex on you comes from this. You know by instinct how to hold a woman's heart, you are warm, and manners are worn into you, so the gate of connection itself has always stood wide open.

But strong light casts a deep shadow, and settling wholly with one person to build a peaceful home was never an easy task for you. There were many connections that stayed near, yet a true partner who could melt even your cold inner life was hard to meet, and connections scattered easily — pride striking pride, or the high wall of the world's gaze. The character for the Tiger sits in the spouse palace of your day branch, so the woman who takes your eye is one with a will clear enough to keep you off balance, upright and sturdy in her force.

But there is something to keep in mind. With your weak water force, meeting a woman whose nature is too fiercely hot will dry your spirit right out. Rather than dazzling looks or worldly fame, you will only find rest when you meet a warm, wise connection that carries a quiet grain like deep water and will take your wandering without a word. There is no reason at all to grow anxious because no one is settled beside you now. The small step to practise from today is to cut away, without hesitation, the relationships tied by show and splendour, and to give a hand's width of room in your heart only to someone before whom you can stand bare-faced.

Looking at the seat of the body — even to my eyes, which have watched a thousand years of human storms, your pain presses sharply. Within the six confirmed characters the Metal force is entirely absent and the Earth force is holding its breath, so the bones, the joints and the nervous system are extremely fragile. The fierce blaze burns the wood and dries the water away, so like a dry branch snapping at a small shock, the pillars of your body were bound to shake — you were born carrying that fate.

The terrible accident you met around the age of twenty was an unavoidable calamity in which the collision of fire and water, the most precarious thing in your chart, struck the flesh itself. The metal driven into your thigh is, ironically, the shape of Metal — the force entirely missing from your chart — forced into the body to hold down a current that was about to scatter. So that your legs differ in length and a fine tremor remains in your fingers is by no means a curse you must carry like a criminal all your life. It is a glorious scar traded for your life as you came back from the threshold of death, and a heavy anchor heaven left behind to warn you against endless pride.

Now that you have entered your forties, that you start by calculating with one leg every time you face an action scene is not cowardice but an entirely honest defensive signal from the body. It is time now to stop fighting that injury to win, and to admit it wholly as part of your own body and hold it. Only, this chart must always take care with the pressure in the blood vessels, the heat of the heart, and the fatigue of stiffening muscle, so when the fine balance of the body wavers, do not be stubborn — go to a doctor and have it read and treated with care.

The year 2026, the Fire Horse year, is one where the sun rises in the heavens and a vast blaze surges from the ground as well. The very same force as your month pillar returns and strikes, so this is plainly a year of great turning in your life, when the axis of your social position and your activity is shaken loose and set anew. The gate of opportunity opens for force gathered in one direction to show explosive power, but on the other hand the blaze is so fierce that inner heat rises in the chest and impulsive burnout comes easily — you stand on a precarious blade.

The current of your luck cycle and this year's fire are colliding head-on, so it cannot be helped that you set an intention and then have the decision overturned by a change in circumstance, or that your inner certainty wavers. "Do I move now, or catch my breath and wait a little longer?" — I hear the tremble in your voice as you ask it, clearly. Let me give you the conclusion plainly. This year, 2026, is not the time to leap onto the stage and swing a sword in open battle. It is the time to tighten your armour inside the walls and sharpen your arrows. Push to the front in haste now and the fierce blaze will only injure you, so building substance and waiting for the moment is by far the wiser handling.

Looking into the force of today, the fourth of September 2026, it is the morning of a Metal Snake day, where autumn's metal and a hidden blaze cross and rest at the seat of severance. Opposed forces strike and the energy bends somewhat. Fatigue comes easily. Today is by no means a good day to seal an important contract or to force hard physical training. Empty your mind and read a script through quietly, or walk and put your thoughts in order — that is enough. Do not hurry. Take a beat's rest.

Seen as a whole, the first half of your life was a time of thrashing to survive inside a burning sea and working a miracle out of it, and the latter half is a late-blooming current that calmly widens its channel and moves out to a great ocean. That unseen injury and physical limit always followed the brilliant glory of your young days like a shadow was the price fate charged for carrying a Fire force that arrived early.

You are now in the middle of the Water Tiger cycle that runs from thirty-five to forty-four. The same water force comes in and lifts you when you are worn through this decade, but the tiger underfoot is still pulling at the blaze, so the inner spending is heavier than it appears. That an enormous name tag has followed you for well over a decade and shakes your sense of self is also because in this stretch the longing to find your own true current has grown that deep. The new assessment you gained through Pachinko is no accident — it is nothing less than the signal flare that you have begun to break the shell and enter the essence.

The Metal Ox cycle ahead, from forty-five to fifty-four, will be the most important turning point of your life. Dew falls on parched ground and frozen metal gives birth to water, so rather than a sharp climb it is a level road on which you catch an even breath, set down the pain of the body and lay up weight and depth layer by layer. In the Metal Rat cycle that follows, from fifty-five to sixty-four, a great cold water pours in and you will at last complete a kingdom that is yours alone.

But let me tell you clearly that a dangerous pass lies ahead where you must not relax. The Fire Horse year of 2026 and the Fire Goat year of 2027, when you turn thirty-nine and forty, are a pass in which a fierce blaze comes in two years running and dries your weak current. By contrast 2031 the Metal Pig year and 2032 the Water Rat year, the threshold into the Metal Ox cycle, are a time when Metal and Water come in one after the other and open the breath of a parched chart. Know these two years of the pass in advance and lower yourself to prepare, and you will be well able to cross the river of pain and reach the sea of glory.

Looking at your temperament through the Western frame for character, the code of ENTP — the debater — stands out clearly. It is a type marked by intuition that never stops exploring new possibilities, thinking that drives at the holes in a logic, and a flexibility unbound by frames. Judged by the force of the chart too, the outward turn that pours energy out and the temperament that freely opens a game fit this frame very well.

Look deeper, though, and a serious inner mismatch is hidden there. The actual ten gods in your chart demand realistic sense and the careful accumulation of experience far more strongly, while the self-knowledge in your head keeps chasing the ideal and the intuitive. And warm feeling and artistic sensibility well up in your chest while you try to wear a cold, rational mask outwardly, so the spirit cannot help but tire. From thirty-five, when the Water Tiger cycle began, this conflict will have deepened further — the flawless star everyone expects colliding head-on with the free spirit inside you.

The reason choosing a project drags past caution into real delay lies exactly here. Your intuition imagines every dazzling possibility and looks far off, while the Steady Wealth force in the chart and your practical reason catch your ankle asking, "Can this really hold together flawlessly? Can my body take it?" That is not craven fear but the entirely natural pain of inner adjustment when head and heart move at different speeds. Just as you threw off one frame and chose Pachinko's Koh Hansu, it is now time to fold your head's calculation back a hand's width and put your body on what the deep feeling inside you points to.

First — people
What you need most are people of deep intuition who seep into any room like water and know how to think a thing through at length. Go near those who ponder deeply, the artists who quietly build a world of their own and the advisers who point out the road from beside you. Merely staying by their still waterside will settle the boiling inside you, so step often into gatherings of creators who share writing and thought and into places of unhurried learning.

Second — surroundings
The space you should stay in is a quiet, deep ground like a waterside, where the noise settles and thought grows deep. Staying long only where lights and heat crowd in dries your force out, so step back and rest in between. When you arrange a studio or a home, choose a cool, still place that faces north, and keep a separate corner where you read and write alone at night and let your thoughts settle.

Third — what you do
You must subtract at once the habit of endlessly writing and erasing scenarios in your head. The thought of going out only after being perfectly prepared is nothing but arrogance, so you must talk with the world by putting your body against it and wake your senses by taking on even a small role or an unfamiliar attempt. In two or three weeks, if the vague unease that pressed on your chest is gone when you open your eyes in the morning and the urge to just try something rises in its place, that is proof that the channel of your fortune has begun to turn without blockage.

Fourth — a token
Every morning before you leave the house, or just before you enter an important room, put a small object with black or deep blue in it before your eyes, or touch it quietly with your fingertips. Take a deep blue tie, a small black stitch on the inside of a coat, or an image of deep water on your phone screen as the signal, and say low to yourself: I am a great water that does not fear a burning blaze. That is enough.

Inside the rigid clan order of old Goryeo or Joseon, a chart like this — thrown into a burning sea with not one thing of its own to lean on — might have been met with a click of the tongue and called a fate of hard wandering that eats its own flesh for life. By the yardstick of an age that thought it fortune to root oneself in family and land and quietly polish a path to office, there was no way to recognise the flair boiling inside you and the Peach Blossom charm that captures a crowd as a treasure worth anything. But in a world now connected on every side, where hundreds of millions of eyes look up at you through the small window in their palm, this chart has turned into the shape of the most brilliant star of all — one that burns its own body to scatter light across the whole world. The age has changed and what was once a flaw has become a worth no one can reach, so you have no reason at all to be ashamed of past pain or of the body's lack.

First, in work and in projects: set down the excessive perfectionism without hurrying, and move with an eye on the current of 2029, the Earth Rooster year, when the force stands behind you. This year, 2026, and next year, 2027, are a time to build substance and dig deep into scripts rather than force yourself to the front, so do not let a hurried heart drive you into hasty over-production.

Second, in relations with people: keep your distance from the crowd that looks up at you only as a dazzling star, and pour your heart into just three or four true friends who will hold even your poor moments and old wounds without a word. Wasting time on showy gatherings that are all surface is the first poison you must cut off this year.

Third, in body and mind: stop seeing the asymmetry of your legs and the tremor as an enemy to be overcome, and carry on a meditation of receiving them as the companions that protected you, ten minutes every night before sleep. Until spring comes next year, avoid high-intensity action training and give yourself only to warm-water rehabilitation that softens the stiffened muscle.

Fourth, to prepare for the new channel of the Metal Ox cycle at forty-five: over the few years remaining, practise throwing off entirely the shell of the young star that has defined you until now. Your true prime has not come yet, so finish preparing to throw your spirit without hesitation into roles that handle the rough, unsparing depths of a human being.

You are not a broken ship. Punching through fierce storms tore the sails a little and left deep scars on the hull, but is that scar not the very proof that you are a great navigator who crossed an ocean?

The path ahead will already be clear from the reasoning of the six characters I have laid out today, but the gate of the hour you were born is still shut fast, so I have not been able to bring out your deepest peace in later years or the bond with your children. In 2031, the Metal Pig year, a time will come when Metal and Water arrive side by side and a great water rises in the parched channel, and what to look to then is where the swollen water should be let run — come again then with the exact hour of your birth held in your heart. When that time comes I will tell you the last secret of your spirit, the one I have told no one.

Man with a flame in his chest that will not go cold — walk on toward your own season, step by step, without fear.

A great river dried out under a scorching sun, and earth that had been baking and hardening alone, stood facing each other. The current was too parched to have anything to spare for wetting the earth, and the hard earth pressed heavily on the waist of the thirsting current, so however much each tried to give the other, in the end it was their own bottom that showed.

What happens when the two day pillars first meet

This bond arrived as the flutter of romance, but in essence it was Yang Water, a great body of water, meeting Yin Earth, dry field soil — a meeting that could hardly run clear from the start. Your chart is a Water Tiger day pillar set in the burning blaze of late summer, the day master so thin and parched that the current could barely keep itself. The other is an Earth Snake day pillar of late autumn, with hot Snake fire as the Nurturer laid beneath and two firm Dog earth Rivals at the month command, so her force was very strong and her earth very solid. On the face of it her earth looked like a breakwater that would block your excess heat, and in her eyes the green wood and forest you carried looked like the very partner she had wanted to hold.

But the ground of the two who stood facing each other under the name of romance was badly crossed in the grain of its force, too crossed to hold each other whole. You had the Creative Tiger wood in your day branch and the Peach Blossom force around it, taking all the world's eyes, and you met the world with a temperament that likes to speak out (ENTP) and with a quick-witted way of moving. She was closer to a temperament that quietly settles her deepest feeling and holds her conviction and ideals alone (INFP). At first she will have had her eyes taken by your dazzling wit and unhindered expression, and you will have wanted to lean a while on her unshaken solidity and quiet embrace.

But to give the conclusion first: this relationship held a spark that drew the two together on the outside while holding, inside, a blade that closed each other's throat, so the deeper it went the harder the wounds were to avoid. Your current needed to run clear, but her great mound of earth stood in its path and stirred the water muddy, and you could not become fresh living water for her but left her only a parched thirst — so beneath the splendour of the beginning, fatigue already lay thick.

How the day branches, hidden stems and formations interlock underneath

The force working at the bottom when the two went into private space and faced each other alone was deeply precarious. Your spouse seat, the Tiger wood in the day branch, met her spouse seat, the Snake fire in her day branch, forming both the Tiger-Snake punishment and the Tiger-Snake harm at once. A punishment is a sharp friction that forcibly shaves at and rams the other's frame; a harm is a mismatch that breeds unexplained resentment and inner illness the closer you get.

From outside they may have looked like lovers who did the same work and understood each other, but once they went into the private seat of the two of them, a word or an act you tossed out without thought would scrape her deep pride and cut. That is because the Performer Yang Metal hidden in her stems and the Creative Yang Wood in yours struck each other underneath as edged metal against wood. What you said meaning to clear the air honestly felt to her like control or a push, and every time she raised her wall in silence, you hit that wall, lost your words, and had your force drain away.

Moreover her day branch Snake fire was, in your chart, a seat where the force had emptied out entirely. However fully you reached out to hold her, an emptiness like grasping a handful of air would have cast its shadow over the two of them in bed and in their private talk. The instinctive draw between them, the spark, plainly existed, but that warmth could not stay as a fondness that warms the skin and easily became a burn that scorched each other's tender flesh.

The structure of filling in what the other lacks

The Vital Element is like the clean air a person must breathe to live, and the exchange of force between these two was badly tilted to one side. But mistake which way it tilted and you miss the whole inside of this bond. Your chart is a water with not one root, ringed by blaze on every side, and it never had the strength to fight that fire alone. So your way to live was never to take more of the fire into your arms. It was to call in the same water to swell your own current, and to feed the spring of that water with cool metal. What opens your breath is water, then the metal that gives birth to it, and it is the fire on every side that dries your current as your Avoid Element.

Conversely her chart, its own force too strong, uses the Wood that turns over her thick earth and keeps it in good order as her Vital Element, and shuns the metal that cuts that Wood down as her Avoid Element. And what of your chart? It holds two seats of the Wood she welcomes, Rabbit wood and Tiger wood, and not one point of the metal she shuns. So merely by being near you became the forest that tills her earth, and the giving side of the exchange was amply done by you.

But the one Snake ember she carried was no airhole to you. It was one more fire laid on a blaze already overflowing. The two Yang Wood trees standing side by side in her heaven fed that fire further as well, so from where she stood she held no water to hand you. What went wrong was exactly there. The water you had been thirsting for was nowhere in her six characters, and all she had to offer was the earth and fire that press your current down. The one who gave the breath and the one left thirsty in the end were both you.

Who pushes and who holds

The balance of strength in this relationship was tilted thoroughly to one side. Yours is an extremely weak chart, the day master without a single root in the original chart, its force scattered into wealth and output; hers is a very strong chart, holding the month command and seated on the force of the Emperor. The world saw you as the vessel of a bold and commanding lead, but in the bottom stamina and mental durability of the given chart, that woman carried a far thicker and tougher frame.

When a weak current meets strong earth, at first it wants to lean on that firm bank and find stability. But as time passed her stubborn firmness and heavy standards will have felt like a weighty embankment closing in on you from every side. Even without raising her voice outwardly she had a particular tenacity that would not bend her intent, and before that pressure you could not help but choose, more and more, to shut your mouth and step back rather than fight her with logic.

A weak person needs unconditional embrace in a place of rest to recover when outside eyes and stress pour in. But she too shouldered two clear standards and a sense of honour, and in watching the world's eye and holding herself strictly in check she had no room to receive that thinned heart of yours generously. The pushing strength was hers, while your legs, the ones holding, buckled first — so the scale of the relationship tipping was hard to avoid.

How their energy levels matched

The difference in the speed and the weight class with which the two pushed through and bore life's waves was also very large. She was born with the Emperor's flag planted in her day branch, holding a very strong inner force that gathers herself and breaks through a situation head-on whatever storm comes. You have the force of illness laid in your day branch, so your sensitivity is extremely fine, your mind tires easily at a change in the air around you or at another's gaze, and you take pain deeply.

When the great wave of the public eye came down, she will have borne it in silence with the Emperor's pride and tried to hold her place, while to you that heavy air itself came as an illness pressing on the chest. You will have wanted to slip into shade and steady your breath quietly, and yet the responsibility and weight demanded inside the relationship stayed as heavy as ever, so the two strides could only widen apart.

One tries to stand on top of the situation with the force of a summit, while the other, her force scattered, longs for quiet recovery — so neither could match the other's pace and both wore down. Your carefulness and silence may have looked to her like irresponsibility or a weak evasion, and her composure and endurance will have come to you as cold, suffocating stubbornness, so the temperature of their hearts ran in different directions.

The ten-god mechanics between them

Looking into the tangle of the partner star that defines the bond between a man and a woman, a truly ironic knot appears. In your chart the wealth star that means a woman is the Fire force, and she held that Fire force inside her own body in the form of the Nurturer, so she used it as a force to keep you inside her arms and control you. Conversely the authority star that means a man for her is the Wood force, and you held that Wood force amply in your day branch and year branch as output, so in her eyes you appeared as an extremely attractive man to be desired. The mechanics of her wanting you deeper and harder, of her wanting to hold you, lie here.

But to you her Yin Earth was the character of Noble Authority, which comes down on me without mercy and tries to shape me. Noble Authority is the law of the world and strict discipline, so every time you faced her you had to watch your step like someone put on trial, and instead of breathing freely you will have suffered the compulsion to fit yourself to her standards and to the world's eye level. And that authority star of hers had put down no root in the branches and hung in the air, so while it demanded outwardly the figure of an upright partner, it could hardly become the real support that blocks the fierce weather of actual life.

Long ago, in the busy market streets of Lin'an in the Song age, I saw a potter and a woman of a trading house with charts just like yours. The potter shaped fine clay and drew out beautiful colour, but he was tender inside and wanted to stay in his quiet workshop; the woman commanded a great trading house and meant to make his talent shine in the very middle of the world's attention. But the potter, breathless before her firm honour and her gaze, at last barred the kiln door, and the woman never did understand that silence. When the world's eye fills even the room the two are in, a ten-god frame that has not resolved clearly becomes exactly this — a rope that binds them together.

The star codes laid over the relationship

The colour of the stars laid over this bond hid a deep solitude behind its splendour. Your chart had the Peach Blossom that enchants people and pulls the eye, boiling away; her chart lay thick with the Artistic Star, which buries splendour under its own feet and sinks alone. Both were born to a fate that feeds on the public gaze, but the way each handled that light was entirely different.

Your Peach Blossom was a radiance bursting outward, so the world's light followed you everywhere; her Artistic Star was a force that turns to sit behind the dazzling stage, burning incense in her own heart alone and working her wounds down. When the meeting of the two was laid bare to the world, your Peach Blossom force will have taken that gaze full on the body and flared hotter and worn you out, while her Artistic Star was wounded by the endless talk and hid deeper into her own cave.

Moreover you floated the gracious star of the Heavenly Noble over her, while her seat handed you both an empty void and a punishment star at once — so the more the dazzling spotlight poured down, the thinner the private exchange between them grew and the more bitterly each one's solitude deepened. The world looked on with envy and called them the lovers of the age, but inside, once the splendid husk was peeled back, only a cold stillness and fatigue surrounded the two.

Void, resentment, clash and harm

The decisive trap that brought the relationship down was the Tiger-Snake punishment and the Tiger-Snake harm lurking in the day branches, and the fact that her day branch fell on your void. This does not show while things are calm, but the moment the environment around the two narrows and outside pressure is applied, it spreads like venom. In 2015, the Wood Goat year, when they first met, the Wood force came in and for a while they seemed to fill each other's lack, but moving into 2016 the Fire Monkey year and 2017 the Fire Rooster year, a cold metal force began to shake both day branches without mercy.

In particular 2016, the Fire Monkey year, was when your day branch Tiger wood, her day branch Snake fire and the year's Monkey metal gathered together to complete the terrible blade of the three-way punishment. From then on, misunderstandings that could not be spoken, inner illness, and cracks from each one's own circumstances were already cut deep between them. They may have held onto the frame outwardly, denying the reports of a break, but inside, the edged blade already turned toward each other made even joining hands frightening.

And in 2017, the Fire Rooster year, when you entered service and the passage to the world closed and your body was bound, her day branch Snake fire bound with the year's Rooster metal and turned into metal, so your frail current froze solid and she took the steps of finding her own road and settling her heart. The void means the emptiness of sand running out the moment you think you have it in hand, so while you were shut inside the real constraint of service, reducing your words and digging into yourself, her seat had already withdrawn to a far distance your hand could not reach. You did not lose it by doing something badly wrong — the gears of time turning between two charts became a blade and cut both hands, so the cord you were holding had to be let go.

How to handle this relationship

Though the knot of that past bond is undone and each walks a separate road, to answer the self-blame you ask about: you lost nothing at all. From the start your given chart was bone-dry without a drop of water, and you met someone carrying earth equally hot and vast, so it was no different from a thirsting man drinking salt water. That you fell silent and cut your words short was not cowardice but the only defence your frail chart chose in order to live. Had you traded more words, the blade of the punishment would have cut at each other's character and ended in a far uglier collapse, so withdrawing quietly was rather the way of keeping the last courtesy left.

Look at the flow of time ahead. Reading the crossing of the luck cycles, you are in the Water Tiger cycle from 2022 to 2032, facing the figure of your own day pillar again, while she is passing through the Metal Horse cycle from 2025 to 2035. Although the currents do flow into a phase where the Wood of your cycle carries the force she needs and there is something to lend from your side, that will only be used as manure for each to achieve socially on their own stage; it is not a fortunate path for tangling together and touching flesh again. The heart that clutches at the ghost of a past bond and blames itself, asking "why did I do that then" — that is the heavy sandbag you must set down first of all.

There is an axis you must hold when you meet a new bond ahead. First, find someone who amply carries the clear deep water — the metal and water force — that will cool your burning chart. Meet earth like hers, hard outside but dry within, and you will again find your breath closing and your mouth shutting. Second, do not hide behind the public gaze or the splendour of conditions; choose someone like a comfortable resting place, before whom you can lay out your frail and tired inner life without shame when the two of you are alone. Third, drop the habit of building your wall in silence when conflict comes, and learn the way of speaking that honestly admits your limit: "my force is short and I am tired right now, so let us catch our breath and talk in a moment." That is the only means of not falling into the same trap in the next bond.

The past bond between the two of you was not one person abandoning or ruining another; it was like dry lightning on a spring day, two people meeting in a season when both were far too hot, unable to bear each other's blaze and scattering naturally. Each is living well and giving off their own light in their own place, so set the heavy self-blame of that time afloat on the river, and put your heart into filling the frail current inside you cool and clear.