Energy Path Freedom and Gravitational Coupling: A Three-Regime State-Space Hypothesis for Free, Intermediate, and Confined Energy

This paper develops the earlier Tri-State Energy Representation into a sharper three-regime state-space hypothesis. Energy is organized into a free/null radiative reference, an intermediate sub-luminal or non-null regime, and a confined/bound regime. The proposed ordering variable is not coordinate speed but an operational measure of the admissible causal or transport paths determined by local spacetime and field structure. Established relativistic geometry already constrains those paths. The framework asks a narrower question: whether an independently reconstructed accessibility coordinate P can carry information beyond ordinary compactness and standard geometric descriptors, and whether an independently measured confinement coordinate χ exhibits the hypothesized conditional relation ∂m/∂P ≤ 0, with m(P, X) = E[χ | P, X]. The pairing χ = 1 − P is not used. In the static spherical Schwarzschild construction the escape-cone estimator reduces to a function of compactness and therefore supplies a null control rather than independent evidence. Universal Exchange Medium Theory is treated only as an optional candidate reading of the free/null boundary. The framework does not modify general relativity.