Chapter Three: The Market Is Not Random

At 10:01 a.m., Shen had $8.31. Before the market closed, he needed to turn it into a seat at Vault's table. Hidden in the mathematics center archive, the three studied Mu-Zero's reconstructed network. The proposition, translated into plain language, was simple: Vault could falsify prices, but not simultaneously falsify where money entered, where risk ended, and which loss it feared. Shen had to find their unique intersection. He unfolded the network through time. Static graphs lied; processes did not. Yet every seventeen minutes Vault changed its routing rules, destroying each fixed-topology invariant. Mu-Zero offered a hint in exchange for the full execution log of the first deletion.