As a divinatory line, nine at the third place of After Completion reads within the hexagram's overall concern with progress in small matters, advantage in being firm and correct, good fortune at the beginning but there may be disorder at the end. 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 a former ruler attacking the Devil's Country and conquering it in three years, small men should not be employed in the campaign, 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 correspond here, since one line is yin and the other yang. Read together with the trigram it belongs to, Li 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 After Completion turns Li into Zhen while the other trigram, Kan, stays as it is, which yields After Completion's changing partner, Difficulty at the Beginning (King Wen 3), the hexagram this line is recorded as transforming into.