negative_payload, ego-self axis. The whole-work stance is a first-person grievance that locates all fault outside the self and hardens into scorekeeping and payback against watchful neighbors. Degraded 7 (accountability-refusal): the narrator insists the problems others see are theirs to imagine, not his to own; the work rehearses denying one's own faults and placing every fault outside the self. Degraded 9 (us-vs-them): neighbors are framed as adversaries angling to score, so the narrator resolves to score back; the friction is mutual and pointed rather than reconciling. Closing menace brushes Corrupted (a warning that one wrong move ends in death, the opening rooster image transposed onto a graveside guard), but it reads as swaggering threat inside a grievance frame, not as sustained glorified violence; the whole-work weight holds at Degraded. R16 sympathetic underlay: the loneliness of a man living alone and presumed broken by nosy neighbors gives the spite a human root, which keeps the charge off the deep-orange floor and lands it mid-orange. TIER orange, CHARGE -33. allow_deficit TRUE: name the real corrosion with teeth (adversarial neighbor posture, refusal of accountability, tit-for-tat escalation toward threat). rule-O OFF.

negative_payload, ego-self axis. The whole-work stance is a first-person grievance that locates all fault outside the self and hardens into scorekeeping and payback against watchful neighbors.