diff --git a/vendor/el-runtime/v1.0.0-20260501/el_runtime.c b/vendor/el-runtime/v1.0.0-20260501/el_runtime.c
index 0ea4fc7..78152f0 100644
--- a/vendor/el-runtime/v1.0.0-20260501/el_runtime.c
+++ b/vendor/el-runtime/v1.0.0-20260501/el_runtime.c
@@ -9654,12 +9654,25 @@ el_val_t engram_search_json(el_val_t query, el_val_t limit) {
                     }
                     if (sem && n->emb && n->emb_dim == qdim) {
                         double c = eg_cosine(n->emb, qv, qdim);
-                        /* Semantic leg: identical to eg_sem_term(), which is
-                         * left in place and still used by engram_search().
-                         * Inlined here only so one cosine serves both uses. */
-                        if (c > ENGRAM_EMBED_SEED_MIN) {
-                            double sv = (c - ENGRAM_EMBED_SEED_MIN) / (1.0 - ENGRAM_EMBED_SEED_MIN);
-                            if (sv > 1.0) sv = 1.0;
+                        /* Semantic leg, claim 24 verbatim: "returning the node
+                         * records whose embedding vectors have the HIGHEST
+                         * COSINE SIMILARITY to a query vector" — a ranking, with
+                         * no threshold anywhere in the claim. The leg used to be
+                         * gated at ENGRAM_EMBED_SEED_MIN and rescaled onto
+                         * [SEED_MIN,1]; that constant is defined (l.6083) as the
+                         * SEED-JOIN threshold for the HippoRAG pass, and reusing
+                         * it as a result filter is not authorised by claim 24.
+                         * Measured on this corpus, it is also not a quality
+                         * gate: true paraphrase targets score 0.459-0.657 while
+                         * the nonsense controls' own nearest neighbours score
+                         * 0.553-0.622 — the distributions overlap, so no value
+                         * of the constant separates them. What actually holds
+                         * the nonsense control is corpus vocabulary (see the
+                         * nhits==0 gate below), not cosine magnitude.
+                         * Claim 32: clamp the cosine to [0,1] rather than let a
+                         * negative value invert the signal. */
+                        if (c > 0.0) {
+                            double sv = c > 1.0 ? 1.0 : c;
                             sem[nsem].idx = i; sem[nsem].sem = sv; nsem++;
                         }
                         /* Graph seeds: top-K by RAW cosine, insertion-ordered. */
@@ -9677,6 +9690,21 @@ el_val_t engram_search_json(el_val_t query, el_val_t limit) {
                         }
                     }
                 }
+                /* CORPUS-VOCABULARY GATE — the thing that actually keeps an
+                 * unfloored semantic leg from answering gibberish.
+                 * nhits == 0 means NO stored record contains ANY query token
+                 * anywhere in its content, label or tags: the query is outside
+                 * the graph's vocabulary entirely. A vector index always has a
+                 * nearest neighbour, so without this gate the semantic leg
+                 * answers "zqxjvw plimforth grebulon" with its 0.55-cosine
+                 * garbage. It is also the honest reading of Will's retrieval
+                 * contract: 05-detailed-description l.64 has the caller supply
+                 * "one or more seed node UUIDs representing the current active
+                 * context", and every leg here is downstream of finding those
+                 * seeds. No seeds, no retrieval — the graph declines rather
+                 * than confabulates. Suppressing the graph seeds too keeps the
+                 * associative leg from running off the semantic top-K alone. */
+                if (nhits == 0) { nsem = 0; nsemseed = 0; }
                 /* BM25-shaped lexical score. Binary term frequency (the match
                  * primitive is a substring test, not a count), Lucene-form IDF,
                  * and length normalisation over the corpus mean. A token that