diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
index a35e457..91d11b7 100644
--- a/README.md
+++ b/README.md
@@ -178,6 +178,26 @@ Runtime script compilation therefore had no effect, silently. `overlay/Scripts/S
 | `BridgeAccountLink.cs` | `[link` account linking (Phase 5): one-time code, `link.confirm`, `WebsiteUserId` account tag. |
 | `BridgeTownCrier.cs` | Town-crier news (Phase 6): inbound `towncrier.add` / `remove` into the global crier list, with abuse caps. |
 
+The Asset Bridge's own files (protocol 8, `docs/link/v8.md`) — the shard reading the operator's UO
+client and its own ServUO tree, and the only part of this plugin that touches files rather than the
+world:
+
+| File | Responsibility |
+|------|----------------|
+| `BridgeAssets.cs` | The plane's front door: the single-slot gate that answers `bridge.busy`, the 512 KiB batch budget, the paging envelope, the family registry, and the background hashing pass that fingerprints the client files without holding the slot. |
+| `BridgeAssetValidator.cs` | Judges an index entry (and, for statics, the record behind it) **before** handing an id to `Ultima`. The boundary that turns 22,102 confident wrong pictures on a stock client into honest absences (§4.5). |
+| `BridgeCatalog.cs` | The body catalogue: which bodies have art, at which action, and the per-body action ceiling that stops the fallback walk serving the next body's picture (§4.10). |
+| `BridgeArt.cs` | Item statics and land tiles on demand, hued on the shard from `tiledata.mul`, behind a byte-bounded cache. |
+| `BridgeUop.cs` | The narrow UOP animation reader, written without `System.Drawing` — the one decoder here that is not ServUO's (§4.3). |
+| `BridgePng.cs` | Our own PNG encoder, for the same reason. |
+| `BridgeBodies.cs` | Slug → body id, on the **Core thread**: construct the type, read `Body.BodyID`, delete it. The one question no code outside ServUO can answer (§8). |
+| `BridgeCliloc.cs` | The Mythic cliloc decompressor, ported from UOFiddler (Beerware) — ServUO's own `Ultima.StringList` cannot read a modern client's compressed table (§9). |
+| `BridgeTree.cs` | The shard's own `Spawns/*.xml` and friends as a `tree` key family, in gzipped 512 KiB chunks, behind its own consent `Bridge.TreeEnabled` (§10). |
+
+**The table above is the transport plus the Asset Bridge, not all 38 files** in that directory —
+the streams added by protocols 3 through 7 (visibility, leases, participation, the event plane's
+world verbs) are documented in their own design docs rather than here.
+
 `Emit()` is called from the Core thread. It enqueues and returns — it never touches the socket, never blocks, never allocates a syscall. **A wedged or absent sidecar cannot stall the shard**, and that is the property everything else depends on.
 
 ## Testing