As a divinatory line, nine at the second place of Dispersion reads within the hexagram's overall concern with progress and success, the king approaching his temple, advantage in crossing the great stream, advantage in being firm and correct. The line occupies a place that does not match 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 hurrying to the support of the stand on which his dispersion depends, occasion for repentance disappears, is the particular fortune assigned to this one stage of the situation, not to the hexagram as a whole.
The second line corresponds by classical convention with the fifth line, and the two do not correspond here, since both lines share the same character. Read together with the trigram it belongs to, Kan in the lower position of the figure, the line marks the situation settling into its own character, still wholly inside the lower trigram, 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 second line of Dispersion turns Kan into Kun while the other trigram, Xun, stays as it is, which yields Dispersion's changing partner, Contemplation (King Wen 20), the hexagram this line is recorded as transforming into.