Color Confinement as a Thermodynamic Load-Balancing Protocol: Evidence from Topological Networks

The current Paper 61 benchmark does not claim that full continuum QCD has already been derived inside QGEFT. It does show that the verified delayed-choice standard-model surrogate now supports a direct control experiment in which detector-forced `SU(3)` commits remain systematically hotter when conjugate anti-color repair is disabled. In the paired deep scans, the control branch exceeds the confinement branch by `34.99` mean total-energy units and `38.03` final total-energy units at `N=64`, and by `23.86` and `27.96` respectively at `N=128`. At the same time, the confinement branch accumulates explicit negative local relief of `-59.78` across `161` events at `N=64` and `-34.61` across `67` events at `N=128`. The defensible conclusion is therefore that confinement is empirically realized here as a thermodynamic load-balancing rule that cools detector-forced local overloads.