As a divinatory line, nine at the fifth place of The Well reads within the hexagram's overall concern with a town may be changed while the fashion of its wells is never changed, the well neither decreasing nor increasing, and all who come and go draw from it and are benefited. The line occupies a place proper to 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 the well cold and clear, its spring water good to drink, is the particular fortune assigned to this one stage of the situation, not to the hexagram as a whole.
The fifth line corresponds by classical convention with the second 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 upper position of the figure, the line marks the ruling stage of the hexagram, the place classical reading treats as its centre of authority, 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 fifth line of The Well turns Kan into Kun while the other trigram, Xun, stays as it is, which yields The Well's changing partner, Pushing Upward (King Wen 46), the hexagram this line is recorded as transforming into.