Hexagram 18: Work on What Has Been Spoiled Changing to Hexagram 42: Increase

I Ching casting meaning · Gu → Yi

Here's the payoff hexagram. The repair work is compounding into Increase—wind and thunder multiplying each other, a genuine expansion arriving because the foundation finally holds. This is the season where fixing the broken thing releases more than it cost: energy, trust, opportunity all flowing in at once. The instruction is to receive actively. Increase isn't a dividend you watch; it's capital you deploy. Pour the new surplus into the people and projects that helped with the cleanup, and correct your own flaws while conditions are forgiving—the hexagram pairs receiving with self-improvement for a reason. Concretely: take the biggest open door in front of you this month. It opened because of the work, not instead of it.

A casting that moves from Work on What Has Been Spoiled into Increase means the situation you asked about is not static — it begins as one pattern and resolves into another. The first hexagram describes where you stand; the second describes where events are carrying you.

Highlighted in red: lines 1, 2, 3 and 5 are moving — counted from the bottom. A moving line is where the change is actually happening: it flips from yang to yin or back, and that flip is what turns Work on What Has Been Spoiled into Increase.

The situation: Hexagram 18, Work on What Has Been Spoiled

Something spoiled needs repair. Name the rot, fix the root.

Wind trapped under a mountain — stagnation that's gone stale long enough to spoil. This hexagram hands you a repair job: a project, habit, relationship, or system that used to work and now quietly doesn't, because something at the root went wrong a while ago. Surface fixes won't hold. Go find the original decision, the deferred maintenance, the thing everyone politely stopped mentioning. It's uncomfortable work with a real payoff — this decay is fixable, and fixing it releases energy that's been stuck for months. Be thorough, be honest about causes, and finish what the cleanup starts.

Structurally, Work on What Has Been Spoiled is Wind below Mountain — the inner state meeting the outer condition. That pairing is the lens for everything above.

Where it's heading: Hexagram 42, Increase

True increase. Wind and thunder multiply each other.

The changed hexagram is the trajectory, not a verdict. As the moving lines settle, the energy of Work on What Has Been Spoiled gives way to Increase (Yi) — Thunder below Wind. The advice that belongs to this outcome: Use the surplus boldly: invest in what matters and fix one fault fast.