Strange Account｜A Feng-Shui Manuscript Torn to Half a Page, the Second Half Missing

(This piece is a transcription of an item submitted by a reader. The manuscript is damaged, of unknown provenance, and its authenticity is unverified.)

The person who submitted it says this half-page was dug out of an elder's effects, tucked inside an old account ledger. The paper is old, the writing done in brush, recording the verses for tracing the dragon and pinpointing the spot. The first half is legible—it's of the Fenjin Point-Siting school. The odd thing is, it breaks off at the most crucial point—not because it's finished, but because someone tore the second half away cleanly along the fold.

The last legible lines of what remains read:

To trace the dragon, first trace the configuration; to pinpoint the spot, first pinpoint the qi. Configuration has true and false; qi has life and death.

All the world knows the Dead-Ground and Reverse-Dragon spots are ill-omened. Only the Third Spot is not written of in the world. Whoever pinpoints this spot must remember the Sixteen Characters that follow—

The 'Sixteen Characters that follow' are gone. The paper is torn off right here. What those sixteen characters were, this half-page does not preserve.

The submitter says he asked several knowledgeable elders, and none would take up the subject. One looked at it a long time and said only a single sentence: 'A book like this has always been passed down by halves. Whoever holds the other half owes a debt paid in a life.' Then he pushed the paper back and would not give it a second glance.

We're posting it to try our luck: is there anyone who happens to hold 'that other half'? Or who knows the lost sixteen characters?

If there truly is—a word of advice as well: do as that elder meant, and don't make noise about it. Some books torn in two are not lost; someone deliberately keeps them from being made whole.