As a divinatory line, nine at the first place of Breakthrough reads within the hexagram's overall concern with the culprit's guilt exhibited at the royal court, with sincere and earnest appeal, and a consciousness of the peril in cutting the criminal off. 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 strength advancing with the toes alone, going forward without the means to succeed, is the particular fortune assigned to this one stage of the situation, not to the hexagram as a whole.
The first line corresponds by classical convention with the fourth line, and the two do not correspond here, since both lines share the same character. Read together with the trigram it belongs to, Qian in the lower position of the figure, the line marks the opening of the situation, before the trigram above it has any part in the reading, 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 first line of Breakthrough turns Qian into Xun while the other trigram, Dui, stays as it is, which yields Breakthrough's changing partner, Great Preponderance (King Wen 28), the hexagram this line is recorded as transforming into.