This paper tackles a deceptively important question in VERSF: if the Higgs field really emerges from the underlying VERSF structure, does it propagate through space with the right strength, or has an arbitrary scaling factor been hidden in the mathematics? Earlier work had already found the right kind of “neighbour-to-neighbour” behaviour for a Higgs-like field, but there was still a factor in the calculation whose physical meaning had not been settled. This paper shows that once the propagation is measured using the spatial ruler generated by VERSF itself, that apparent extra factor is just bookkeeping from the underlying discrete description. The geometric propagation rule reduces to the standard form with no adjustable coefficient added by hand.
It then goes a step further. VERSF contains several more complicated sectors that could, in principle, have altered the Higgs propagation strength once the full system was taken into account. The paper proves that the physical Higgs direction is completely invisible to an entire class of those corrections: the known defect, history, bath and commitment effects all vanish exactly on that direction, including possible mixing with other modes. That is useful because it rules out several places where an unknown correction might otherwise have been hiding.
There is still one genuine normalization question left, and the paper is careful not to pretend otherwise. VERSF now has two ways of measuring how different nearby physical states are: one coming from the dynamics of a single Fact, and another reconstructed from how densely distinguishable states are packed. On the one-dimensional Higgs direction, the difference between those two rulers can be reduced to a single quantity, . The paper does not assume this quantity is one; instead it isolates proving that the two rulers are actually the same as the next clean calculation. If that bridge is derived, the remaining Higgs propagation normalization is fixed rather than fitted.
For the wider VERSF Standard Model derivation, that is real progress because it removes another potential free parameter from the Higgs sector and tightens the chain leading toward a physical Higgs mass. The paper also shows that the step-by-step VERSF evolution and spatial Higgs propagation use exactly the same underlying Higgs coefficient, so there is no second independent normalization hiding on the time side; what remains there is the still-unfinished map between sequential Facts and emergent physical time. The existing VERSF Higgs chain still gives about 123.8 GeV compared with the measured 125.2 GeV, but this paper does not claim that result is finished: the distance-ruler bridge, physical-time attachment, operational-flow derivation and the remaining gauge/Yukawa and threshold corrections still have to be completed. What HSPR-1 achieves is to make that remaining work much narrower and much harder to hide behind arbitrary normalization choices.