As a divinatory line, six at the sixth 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 no one left to call on for help, and the end will be evil, is the particular fortune assigned to this one stage of the situation, not to the hexagram as a whole.
The sixth line corresponds by classical convention with the third line, and the two correspond here, since one line is yin and the other yang. Read together with the trigram it belongs to, Dui in the upper position of the figure, the line marks the far edge of the hexagram, past the point the ruling fifth line governs, one stage in the six stage movement the hexagram traces from its first line to its last.
A change at this line, from yin to its opposite, is the mechanism the tradition uses to move from one hexagram to another. Flipping the sixth line of Breakthrough turns Dui into Qian while the other trigram, Qian, stays as it is, which yields Breakthrough's changing partner, The Creative (King Wen 1), the hexagram this line is recorded as transforming into.