Cosmic chronometers extract H(z) from differential galaxy ages, no ladder, no candles, no assumed cosmology, and three decades of compilations land H₀ at 66-to-69, below the ladder's 73 and compatible with Planck, from systematics shared with neither. The standard framing scores this against the ladder's correctness, ignoring that the clocks tick at redshifts 0.1 to 2 while the ladder calibrates within a few hundred megaparsecs of home.
One global H₀ makes the chronometers' sampling volume irrelevant: a low reading anywhere indicts a high reading everywhere. The model cannot process the obvious geometric fact that the two methods measure different places, so an independent witness for "the global rate is 67" is conscripted as a witness against "the local rate is 73."
SCT reads the chronometers as the profile's outer anchor. The method's age pairs sample the broad volume beyond the KBC enhancement, where Λ_eff sits near its global average (P17), so chronometer H₀ extrapolations belong with Planck's 67.4 and the deep BAO values, while the ladder, megamasers, and time delays read the enhanced inner volume near 73 (P19). Far from contradicting each other, the two families trace exactly the radial structure the framework requires: every method anchored inside a few hundred megaparsecs lands high, every method sampling beyond lands low, and the chronometers are the cleanest member of the outer family because their distances come from stellar physics alone. The Hubble tension, assembled method by method, is the Λ_eff gradient drawn by instruments that did not know they were mapping one.
The chronometers also carry a quieter SCT layer: differential ages measure time, and hereditary time transmission (P10) predicts environment-tagged age offsets at the 10⁻⁴ level between cluster and field galaxies, a systematic within reach of the Euclid-era samples that would appear as excess scatter correlated with host environment, signal masquerading as the method's noise floor. Foundations in Paper 1 (P17, P19) with the frame-tree clock structure of Paper 2, From Chaos To Common Ancestry.
No new premises: the outer anchor of the same gradient three local methods already drew from inside.
The profile is the test: industrialized chronometer samples (Euclid, DESI age-dating) measuring H₀ at 73 from the broad volume, matching the local ladder with the gradient absent, would break the radial structure at its far anchor. Equally, chronometer precision reaching 2 percent and landing firmly between the camps with no environment-correlated scatter would strain both the gradient and its frame-tree layer.