As a divinatory line, nine at the second place of Limitation reads within the hexagram's overall concern with progress and attainment, but if the regulations it sets are severe and difficult, they cannot be maintained for long. 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 not going beyond the gate of the inner court, evil, since the right moment for action has been lost, 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, Dui 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 Limitation turns Dui into Zhen while the other trigram, Kan, stays as it is, which yields Limitation's changing partner, Difficulty at the Beginning (King Wen 3), the hexagram this line is recorded as transforming into.