Narrowing down the Hubble tension to the first two rungs of distance ladders

The decade-persistent Hubble tension has become a $5\sigma$ crisis of modern cosmology between the early-Universe extrapolation from globally fitting the standard $\Lambda$CDM to Planck-CMB measurements and the late-Universe measurement from the three-rung distance ladder with SH0ES calibration. Regarding the current dilemma of theoretical resolutions, recent focus has shifted to systematics inspection. Here we find an associated $5\sigma$ tension in the intercept of the supernova magnitude-redshift relation between the second-rung and third-rung supernovae from the PantheonPlus compilation independent of calibrations in use. As required by the consistency of the distance-ladder method, we propose a method to eliminate the intercept tension, directly constraining $H_0=73.4\pm1.0\;\mathrm{km/s/Mpc}$ from the first two-rung distance ladder alone without referring to the third-rung supernovae but still consistent with both SH0ES typical three-rung and first two-rung constraints, which not only supports our method to rebuild the intercept consistency but also rules out third-rung supernova systematics including the late-time transition in supernova absolute magnitude. Further crosschecking with the Carnegie Supernova Project revealed that different calibrators alone still consistently prefer our results. Therefore, the original Hubble tension between the Planck-CMB measurements and SH0ES three-rung distance ladder can be narrowed down to a tension between the Planck-CMB and the first two-rung measurements.