The third line is the most severe in the hexagram. Legge's translation describes turning away from nourishment and holding to what is contrary to what is correct, with evil as the outcome, and adds that for ten years no action should be taken and that nothing will be advantageous. The number is less a literal count than the classical way of naming a full cycle, a term long enough for a wrong course to be exhausted rather than merely interrupted. Where the second line asked in the wrong direction, this one refuses proper nourishment altogether.
The stroke is yielding in an odd place, incorrect by the standard rule, and it stands at the top of the lower trigram Zhen, thunder, at the point where movement is most agitated and least anchored. Commentary reads such a position as restlessness with nothing solid beneath it. In a hexagram whose subject is what a person takes in and what that intake makes of them, a line set against the correct source is not merely unfed. It has arranged its own habits around the refusal, which is why the correction is measured in years rather than in a single decision.
Those ten years are the line's real teaching. One bad choice is repaired by a better one, but a settled orientation is not, and the text declines to offer the quicker remedy a reader would prefer. Its counsel is stillness: not action in a better direction, which would only carry the same disposition somewhere new, but a full stop long enough for the disposition itself to change.