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

I Ching casting meaning · Yi → Gu

Increase is turning to face a mess — Work on What Has Been Spoiled. The growth spurt has revealed something that was quietly rotting while you were busy expanding: a neglected system, a toxic hire who was onboarded too fast, a relationship that didn't scale with everything else. The expansion wasn't the whole job; it was the stress test that showed where the structure was weak. Repair is the real assignment now. Name the decay plainly, trace it to its root — probably a decision made in haste during the growth phase — and fix it thoroughly. What you restore now, inside your larger operation, becomes the most solid thing you've built. Increase plus repair is maturity.

A casting that moves from Increase into Work on What Has Been Spoiled 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 Increase into Work on What Has Been Spoiled.

The situation: Hexagram 42, Increase

True increase. Wind and thunder multiply each other.

Wind and thunder feeding each other — energy that multiplies instead of canceling out. This is one of the great draws: genuine increase, the kind where resources, opportunities, and momentum all rise together. The classic instruction has a spine to it, though: increase flows to people who use it well. See good, copy it fast. See your own faults, cut them faster. This is also the season to do something significant with the surplus — invest in people, take the meaningful risk, fund the thing that matters. Increase hoarded curdles; increase circulated compounds. You're being given more because the universe expects you to move it.

Structurally, Increase is Thunder below Wind — the inner state meeting the outer condition. That pairing is the lens for everything above.

Where it's heading: Hexagram 18, Work on What Has Been Spoiled

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

The changed hexagram is the trajectory, not a verdict. As the moving lines settle, the energy of Increase gives way to Work on What Has Been Spoiled (Gu) — Wind below Mountain. The advice that belongs to this outcome: Find the root cause of one broken thing and repair it fully.