The emperor’s chief astrologer just got reassigned to the data analytics team. Xuan Yi stared at the glowing monitor, wondering which celestial body decided to punish him with pivot tables. He missed the days when forecasting meant reading tortoise shells, not wrestling with spreadsheets.
His new tech manager handed him a messy dataset and asked for a clean retention forecast. The raw numbers looked like a spilled ink painting, full of missing values and columns labeled things like col_7. Xuan Yi pushed the ergonomic keyboard aside and laid his brass compass across the number pad. Cleaning data required proper feng shui, not Python scripts. He tossed three copper coins, read the falling hexagrams, and started dragging rows around the screen like he was arranging spirit tablets in a temple. The chaos eventually settled into something that vaguely resembled a trend line.
The review meeting arrived with the usual corporate urgency. The manager demanded full transparency and a strict explainable AI framework. Xuan Yi plugged in his laptop, and the presentation screen immediately replaced standard charts with a flat Bagua diagram. The vertical bars morphed into thick, smoking incense sticks. The manager slammed a fist on the conference table, demanding feature importance scores and statistical justification. Xuan Yi simply closed his eyes, pinched his fingers together, and delivered his methodology with the quiet certainty of a mountain hermit. He explained that the model absorbed cosmic variance, and certain predictive weights simply carried too much spiritual gravity for mortal interpretation.
Silence fell over the room, followed immediately by a wave of profound realization. The manager had spent three quarters fighting with the engineering team over algorithmic opacity, only to watch an ancient mystic accidentally deliver the perfect corporate shield. Xuan Yi tapped the keyboard to advance the slide, pointing out how the zigzagging forecast perfectly mirrored the ancient warning that destiny arrives on its own schedule. He told the room that decoding the model’s core parameters would violate the natural order of things, because heavenly secrets are strictly confidential. A cheerful confirmation popup appeared, locking the prediction into the production pipeline.
The manager nodded slowly, completely satisfied with the flawless compliance to their black-box standards. He handed Xuan Yi a glossy compliance badge and a firm thumbs-up. Xuan Yi accepted the promotion with a stiff, practiced smile while a single bead of sweat tracked down his cheek. He finally understood the golden rule of modern tech, where an unexplainable neural network and an unexplainable prophecy get paid exactly the same salary.