Iteration-8 synthesis note (for the synthesizer's record; the human-facing capstone stays CONCLUSION.md).

The single most important judgment this iteration demanded — flagged in the task and re-checked by me independently — is that the carrier track is NOT a clause- or verdict-level RESOLVED-POSITIVE. The A1 outcome is RESOLVED-NEGATIVE: the net/family upgrade does not evade the iteration-7 carrier no-go; it relocates the carrier into the net's index set. I re-derived the engine (covariance–locality obstruction) and confirmed the net-index-set smuggle is genuine against the extended smuggle list: net-modular data (relative modular operators, $\{J_O\}$, HSMI, modular intersection, modular-Berry) adds operators but every modular-covariant pairing remains positive-local or indefinite-nonlocal, and locality enters only through the net's parametrization, which is the geometry (BGL isotony⟺positivity; the Euler element is an input in Morinelli–Neeb–Ólafsson; Lashkari et al. "insisting on a local representation"). So the net no-go strengthens the hedge toward HIGH; it does not flip it.

Second-most-important: I am not incrementing the carrier-convergence route count. The A1 finder wrote "sixth independent convergence"; the referee corrected this to "net-level extension of the fifth route's boost-covariance engine." That correction is binding and I have propagated it everywhere — the wiki count stays five (HYP-FACTORIZATION-IS-GEOMETRY). Any future agent who reads only the finder's headline would over-count; the registry deltas and CONCLUSION amendments lock the five-route count and fold the net upgrade into route (5). This is the kind of subtle inflation the referee discipline exists to catch.

Third: the A3 overclaim. The finder submitted RESOLVED-POSITIVE on OP-49 (c′) ("cap-blindness EXACT", "unconditional"); the referee overturned it to VERDICT-UNCHANGED with (c′) reframed-and-narrowed, NOT closed, because the transmissive-junction mechanism is an INFERENCE-medium extrapolation into the non-unitary imaginary-$c$ regime where the unitary transmissivity bounds fail. I have encoded the referee label, not the finder label — OP-49 keeps three residuals (a)/(b)/(c′), and no CONCLUSION hedge moves from A3. The unconditional reality-mismatch pillar (re-verified) is what keeps OP-49 NEAR-NO-GO regardless.

Net hedge movement: exactly one hedge moves this iteration — the principal one (OP-46 / HYP-CKV-VACUITY / inherited HYP-ENCODING-SCREEN), hardening from MEDIUM-HIGH-conditional-on-single-algebra-ansatz to MEDIUM-HIGH→HIGH-conditional-on-net-constructibility-ansatz. I kept it inside the MEDIUM-HIGH band (worded "MEDIUM-HIGH→HIGH") rather than declaring a clean HIGH, because two named proof obligations remain open (naturality theorem; modular-Berry-holonomy escape). This is the conservative reading and matches the seven-iteration pattern of tightening-without-flipping.

The other three tracks are verdict-neutral sharpenings: A2 (OP-44 R1 theorem-shaped failure-side result with a regularization escape that itself supplies input; R2 obstruction horn reinforced with one named escape), A4 (OP-48c X1 promoted to a theorem-with-a-price-tag, horn C unchanged). No experimental channel emerged from any track; object-level stays not forecastable; the 2027 w(z) point remains the nearest external event.

Seventh consecutive headline-unchanged iteration. The saturation diagnosis survives its third stress test, and the referee's overturn of A3 is positive evidence the process is binding rather than self-confirming.