Splitting Apart closes on the one thing the stripping did not take. Legge's translation shows a great fruit that has not been eaten, then divides the outcome: the superior man finds the people again as a chariot that carries him, while small men overthrow their own dwellings. A hexagram of five yielding strokes and relentless loss ends with a single firm line at the summit, and the fruit is that line. Everything below it has been consumed, and it has not been.
An uneaten fruit is not merely a survivor. It is the part of a plant that carries the seed, so what the image preserves is not a remnant of the old structure but the means of the next one. This is why the hexagram, having advised against movement in any direction for five lines, can end without despair. The decline runs its course and stops at the top, and what is left standing there is precisely the part that regenerates.
The verdict splits along a line the hexagram has been drawing throughout. The one who kept faith with what was upright, as the third line did, finds support returning and is carried; those who did the stripping bring the roof down on themselves, since the structure they were dismantling was also their shelter. A yang stroke in this even position is incorrect by the letter of the rule and is the only firmness in the hexagram, and its survival is the whole argument for why the process was worth outlasting.