Enter Your Birth Data
That is all you need to start. Year, month, day, hour of birth. Gender. The app calculates everything else.
The hour matters. BaZi divides the day into twelve two-hour blocks. Your hour determines your Hour Pillar, which is your innermost self, your private world, your legacy. If you know the exact time, enter it. If you know it approximately ("around 9pm"), enter your best estimate. If you have no idea, leave it blank. The reading adjusts. Three pillars still hold.
If you were born in late January or early February, pay attention. BaZi uses 立春 (Start of Spring, around February 3-5) as the year boundary, not January 1st. The app handles this automatically. But if you have run your chart elsewhere and the year pillar looks different, this is probably why.
If you are in Singapore or Southeast Asia, the app applies a solar time correction. Clock time and solar time differ by about an hour in this region. This can shift your hour branch. The app does this for you. Other calculators may not.
Your First Reading
After you enter your birth data, the reading generates. This takes a few minutes. While it generates, six slides walk you through what the system is doing: identifying your element, mapping your decades, matching your patterns, cross-referencing your palaces.
The last slide asks you a question: What is the most burning question you would like answered right now?
Type it. This is not a formality. Your question becomes the first message in your conversation with 知己. The AI reads your entire chart, then answers your specific question with your specific chart data. That first exchange is the highest-value moment in the product. You asked before you knew your chart. The AI answers after reading everything.
If you skip the question, the reading still arrives. The conversation starts cold. No loss. But the question makes it personal from the first word.
The Reading
Your reading arrives as flowing prose. No bullet points. No numbered lists. Paragraphs. Written to you, about you, using your chart data.
The reading covers:
Your name. If you entered a Chinese name, the reading breaks down the characters. Radical, phonetic component, semantic field. How the meaning of your name connects to your chart. This is not decoration. Chinese names often encode something the parents sensed before BaZi confirmed it.
Your element. Your Day Master. What kind of Water, Wood, Fire, Earth, or Metal you are. Not the textbook definition. The lived reality of carrying that element through your specific chart configuration.
Your current decade. Where you are in the ten-year chapter sequence. What lifecycle phase you are in. What the decade demands. What it offers. What it forbids. This is the centrepiece of the reading because it is the most immediately actionable.
Your full decade map. Every decade from birth to the end of the chart. Each one labelled with its palace, its stem-branch combination, and its lifecycle phase. The current decade marked. The arc of your life visible as a single continuous sequence.
Your prescriptions. Three maximum. Specific. Actionable tonight. Matched to your constitution and your current decade. If a prescription requires resources, connections, or knowledge you do not have, it fails the test. Every prescription passes the floor test: can the person at their worst use this tonight?
Your I Ching position. Which hexagram describes your current moment. Not randomly assigned. Analytically identified from your chart data and current timing. What transition it points to.
Your legacy. What outlasts you. Read from your 子女宫 (Children Palace) and your broader chart arc.
A question. The reading ends with one question back to you. Specific. Based on something the chart revealed. Designed to pull real context from you so the next conversation goes deeper.
Your badges. At the bottom. Talent badges identified from your chart. Each one is a constitutional pattern with a name, a Chinese name, and a personalised description. Tap any badge to read its full page.
The Chart Tab
After the reading, you can view your raw chart data.
BaZi view: Your four pillars displayed with Heavenly Stems, Earthly Branches, hidden stems, Ten Gods, Nayin, and elemental counts. Everything the reading was built from, visible as data.
ZWDS view: Your twelve-palace grid. Every palace with its branch, its stars, its brightness, its lifecycle phase, and its decade timing. The stars are colour-coded by type. The current decade palace is marked.
Badges view: All your earned badges in one place. Library badges (from the 117 canonical patterns) and contextual badges (from your specific star-palace configurations). Tap any badge to read the full article.
The chart tab is reference. You do not need to understand every field to benefit from the reading. But when you want to verify something the reading said, or explore a specific palace, or check which stars sit where, the data is here.
The Conversation
The reading is the beginning. The conversation is where it deepens.
Open the chat. Ask anything about your chart. The AI remembers your reading, your chart data, and your previous conversations. It builds a personal knowledge base that gets sharper every time you return.
The conversation works best when you bring real context. The reading names patterns. The conversation connects those patterns to your actual life.
"The reading said my current decade is 绝. What does that actually mean for the business I am starting?"
"You mentioned 七杀 in my Year Pillar. My childhood was exactly like that. What does it mean for how I parent?"
"My Wealth Palace has 地空. I keep losing money in ways I cannot explain. What is the chart actually telling me to do?"
The AI answers using your specific chart data. Not generic advice. Your Day Master, your current decade, your palace configurations, your specific elemental gaps. Every answer is calibrated to your instrument.
The conversation has depth limits based on your plan. Free users get their first reading and follow-up questions. Paid plans unlock deeper conversation, relationship readings, timing features, and milestone analysis.
Relationship Readings
Enter someone else's birth data. The AI reads their chart independently, then reads the interaction between the two charts.
This works for partners, family members, business co-founders, friends. Any relationship where understanding the structural dynamics would help.
The relationship reading covers: how the two elemental constitutions interact, where the stems combine or clash, where the branches harmonise or conflict, which elements one person carries that the other lacks, and what the decade timing looks like for both simultaneously.
You do not need the other person's permission or presence to run their chart. You need their birth data. Year, month, day, hour if available. Coming soon.
The Handbook
The handbook is the complete directory of every pattern in the system. 213 constitutional patterns across three doctrinal tabs:
体 Self (45 patterns): Who you are. Day Master stems. Nayin types. The constitutional identity.
用 Input (97 patterns): What you choose to absorb. Branch combinations. Special formations. Hexagram positions. The variable element.
器 Capacity (71 patterns): What you were built to carry. ZWDS stars. Decade phases. Palace configurations. The structural instrument.
Every pattern has its own page with a full article. The handbook shows which patterns you have earned (identified in your chart) and which ones exist in the system. Browse to learn. Tap to read. The system teaches itself through the patterns.
The Guides
Educational pages that explain the foundations. If the handbook is the library, the guides are the orientation session.
Start with "How to Read Your BaZi Chart" if you have never seen a BaZi chart before. Then "The Five Elements" to understand the building blocks. Then "The Twelve Palaces" to understand the ZWDS grid. Then "How to Read Your ZWDS Chart" to understand the second system.
You do not need to read the guides to use the product. The reading explains everything inline. But the guides give you the vocabulary to go deeper on your own.
What 知己 Does Not Do
It does not predict the future. The chart maps the instrument and the seasons. Not the song you will play.
It does not tell you what to do. It presents the map. 用谏. The minister presents the map. The king decides the route.
It does not replace a human practitioner. A practitioner who has spent decades reading charts brings intuition and experience that no AI replicates. 知己 brings speed, accessibility, and a voice that is available at 3am when the practitioner is not. They are complementary, not competitive.
It does not work without honest birth data. The chart is calculated from what you enter. If the birth data is wrong, the chart is wrong. Garbage in, garbage out. This is mathematics, not magic.
The Name
知己 (zhī jǐ). The one who truly knows you.
From the classical line: 人生得一知己足矣. In a lifetime, one true knower is enough.
The product is named for that person. The one who looks at you and sees what is actually there. Not what you perform. Not what you wish. What is there.
Run your chart. Read the reading. Ask the question you have been carrying. The mirror has been waiting.