The third line is the single exemption in a hexagram of uniform bad verdicts. Legge's translation places its subject among the overthrowers and then declares that there will be no error. Everything around the line is unchanged. The company is the same company, the process is the same process, and the position inside it is the same position, yet the judgement reverses completely, and the reversal has to be accounted for by something other than circumstance.
The account is structural. Of the five yielding strokes in Splitting Apart, this one alone answers the firm line at the summit, the third and sixth positions being paired in the classical scheme of correspondence. It is therefore facing a different direction from its neighbours while standing in the same crowd. The others are part of the erosion; this line is attached to the one thing the erosion has not reached, and that attachment is the whole of its exemption.
Placement offers no help here. A yielding stroke in this odd position at the top of the lower trigram Kun is incorrect by the letter of the rule, so the line is not being rewarded for propriety. What it is being credited with is allegiance maintained where nobody could see it and nobody around it shared it. The hexagram is willing to say that a person can stand inside a collapse, be counted among those causing it, and still be without fault, provided what they are actually holding to is sound.