The Sickness Star

Two Black, the earth element star, is one of the small number of flying stars treated as inauspicious in essentially every period rather than only outside its own ruling window. Classical and contemporary Xuan Kong practice alike associate it with illness, fatigue and slow health decline, and a bedroom or kitchen falling in a sector Two Black occupies for the year is a standard candidate for remedial treatment in ongoing consultation practice, since these are rooms where extended time is spent.

The standard remedy pairs Two Black's afflicted position with metal objects or colours, following the Five Phase sequence in which metal is produced from earth and, in the remedial reading used here, is understood to drain or exhaust an excess of earth energy rather than reinforcing it. This same logic, using the phase that an afflicted element produces as the corrective, recurs across the system's other inauspicious earth stars and is one of the clearest worked examples of how the productive and controlling cycles of the five phases are applied practically rather than only described in the abstract.