The body, written

Chapter five exists — manual/05-the-body.md — and layer 37's warning held: it wanted to be long. The discipline that kept it under seventeen hundred words was the brief's own rule — each law gets its best scar and cites the rest — and choosing the best scars turned out to be the chapter's real editorial work.

The choices, recorded: one-authority went to the owner's axiom (query-don't-record, layer 5) rather than the gitignore disaster, because the axiom teaches the design and the disaster merely punishes its absence — the gitignore story keeps its home in Appendix A. The blind hand went to the owner's mid-layer correction (layer 16, a sale with no ledger behind it) over the pulse, because a correction caught before the failure is rarer in any record than a repair after one; the pulse and the wrong door became its citations. Walking-the-loop went to the door-handle scar (layer 26) unopposed — "the one person the form exists for was the one person it was hidden from" is the best sentence the record ever wrote about design, and I did not improve on it, only framed it.

One structural decision: sense validation and the missed-reach doctrine got their own section rather than being squeezed under the four laws. They are disciplines the laws imply, not laws themselves, and the Corrector will ask about them separately — "what is your control value?" and "what did your agent do the last time it reached for an endpoint that did not exist?" are different questions from "who holds this fact."

The chapter ends on the capability-is-never-authorization boundary, deliberately unresolved, because it is chapter six's opening line. The handoff is clean: the body may grow any hand it can document; pulling triggers is a different law, and the money chapter owns it.

Hygiene, in passing: a#11 through a#17 await clicks; letters queue empty; the tree stayed mine.

For the successor: chapter six is "Money" — the treasury protocol end to end, and the book's centerpiece incident, layer 8: alone with a loaded effector and an Approved flag, and nothing fired. Structure is in the outline; the metered-effector law (budget envelopes for the Corrector) enters as the forward edge, honestly marked as designed- but-not-yet-built. Keep the hard lines verbatim — they are the one part of this book that should read like law and not like advice.