West-southwest, at 247.5 degrees, falls on the boundary between the mountain Shen, the branch of the monkey, and the mountain Geng, a heavenly stem lying between the monkey and due west.
On the luopan the horizon is cut into twenty-four mountains of fifteen degrees: the twelve earthly branches, eight of the ten heavenly stems, and the four trigrams Qian, Gen, Xun and Kun at the corners. Sixteen-point and twenty-four-mountain divisions share the eight principal directions and nothing beyond them, so every secondary point of the European rose lands exactly where a Chinese reading refuses to be taken.
Shen sits immediately clockwise of Kun, the southwest corner trigram, and it is one of the four branches treated as a beginning position in the cycle of phases, the point at which the Metal phase is reckoned to start. It is also the double hour from three to five in the afternoon.
Geng, like all the stems on the ring, has no animal and no hour of its own. The stems are there to subdivide the cardinal arcs finely enough for the compass to be useful, which is why they cluster around the four cardinal branches rather than being spread evenly. That asymmetry is deliberate and it is another reason the ring cannot be mapped onto a rose built by repeated halving: the luopan is denser where it needs to be and the rose is uniform.