14. The contract, in one line

Bind a real anchor; declare how a label is fetched; the engine probes, fetches once per producer, materializes transiently, runs your Cypher over real + virtual together, and rolls back. Persistence is the exception (warm-cached identity bridges), not the rule.

For the declarative surface (virtualJoins:, producers/, resolve:, pushdown:, paging:, brings:, cache:, views:) see README.md. Views (regular / materialized, output typing, the pluggable cache, persisted scopes, and hydrating a scope into typed instances) are §8.

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