As a divinatory line, nine at the fifth 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. It is also one of the two central lines of the hexagram, the place classical reading treats as the most balanced regardless of the line's own character. Its own text, that the eastern neighbour who slaughters an ox is not equal in the result to the western neighbour's smaller sacrifice, which brings the blessing genuinely, is the particular fortune assigned to this one stage of the situation, not to the hexagram as a whole.
The fifth line corresponds by classical convention with the second line, and the two correspond here, since one line is yin and the other yang. Read together with the trigram it belongs to, Kan in the upper position of the figure, the line marks the ruling stage of the hexagram, the place classical reading treats as its centre of authority, 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 fifth line of After Completion turns Kan into Kun while the other trigram, Li, stays as it is, which yields After Completion's changing partner, Darkening of the Light (King Wen 36), the hexagram this line is recorded as transforming into.