Nine in the second place is the practical instruction of the hexagram, and it concerns accepting an irregular opening. The subject meets his lord in a side lane and there is no error in it. A querent drawing this line usually needs to reach somebody who has become unreachable by the ordinary route, and the counsel is that the meeting will happen sideways or not at all, and that taking it sideways carries no fault.
What the line rules out is the manufactured version. An encounter engineered to look accidental is a formal approach wearing a disguise, and the text describes something genuinely unplanned. The counsel is therefore about readiness rather than about strategy. A person who has kept themselves available, and has not spent the estrangement assembling a case against the other party, is the one who can use the lane when the lane appears.
When the line changes, the lower trigram Dui becomes Zhen and the figure becomes Biting Through, King Wen 21, in which an obstruction lodged between the jaws is bitten through and the figure is read as the clearing of what stands in the way. That is a forceful destination for an accidental meeting, and it is sharpened by the fifth line of this same hexagram, the lord this line has just met, whose own image is of uniting as readily as biting through skin.