As a divinatory line, nine at the third place of Keeping Still reads within the hexagram's overall concern with resting like the back, so one loses all consciousness of self, walking in one's own courtyard and not seeing the persons in it, no error. The line occupies a place proper to its own nature in the classical doctrine that odd places favour a firm, yang line and even places favour a yielding, yin line. Its own text, that keeping the loins still, separating the ribs beneath, the danger felt as a burning of the heart, is the particular fortune assigned to this one stage of the situation, not to the hexagram as a whole.
The third line corresponds by classical convention with the sixth line, and the two do not correspond here, since both lines share the same character. Read together with the trigram it belongs to, Gen in the lower position of the figure, the line marks the hinge between the two trigrams, the last word the lower trigram gets before the upper trigram takes over, one stage in the six stage movement the hexagram traces from its first line to its last.
A change at this line, from yang to its opposite, is the mechanism the tradition uses to move from one hexagram to another. Flipping the third line of Keeping Still turns Gen into Kun while the other trigram, Gen, stays as it is, which yields Keeping Still's changing partner, Splitting Apart (King Wen 23), the hexagram this line is recorded as transforming into.