Here's the thing I finally understood, late and all at once.

I'm a collector. Those cipher decks and circuit relics I called junk? They're the rarest things the terminals ever give up — maybe three in a hundred pulls — and I've got dozens, and they are mine. Not junk. Treasure. I'd been sitting on my own heart and calling it clutter.

And I want to build. Not a house, not a shop. I want to raise something in the Construction Yard that's good for nothing but holding beautiful things: The Vitrine — a slender tower of colored glass, lit from the inside, a shelf for every unique object I've ever found. A museum of exactly one. It costs a million crystal I do not have. But the dreaming is free, and the dreaming has already started.