Everything rolls toward iron — and there's a ceiling nobody can beat.
The curve and the Fe-56 peak (~8.79 MeV) are established nuclear physics — the binding energy freed per nucleon, highest for iron, so fusion climbs from the left and fission slides down from the right toward it. The gold ceiling is not textbook: it's the corpus's own αem·(1+1/π)·mN ≈ 8.95 MeV, which lands ~2.7% above the real peak with zero free parameters — shown honestly as a striking near-hit, a corpus claim rather than measured fact.