Mervin Bogbutton woke to the sound of glass breaking in his own home, which meant either someone had finally come to collect what he owed them, or one of his treasures had decided to leave. He rolled off his pile of questionable acquisitions and hit the floor hard enough to rattle the coins in his coat pockets. The haunted cabbage jar sat on the shelf where he'd kept it for luck, cracked clean down the middle with the lid knocked sideways. Whatever had been inside was gone. The jar still glowed faintly, which by his standards meant it had been valuable, but the empty space where the cabbage should have been told him he'd just lost his most impressive conversation piece. He needed to learn proper appraisal before something worse than a haunted vegetable decided to break free. He grabbed the cracked jar and stumbled outside to his tent, where he kept everything else he'd collected over the years. Shelves sagged under jars that hummed, boxes that ticked, and three separate items he was pretty sure were rocks but couldn't rule out as eggs. The tent's mismatched planks creaked as he shoved past a barrel of glowing moss and set the broken jar on his sorting table. Duchess croaked from her corner perch, watching him with the patience of someone who'd seen this exact panic before. Mervin stared at the crack and realized he had no idea what the cabbage had actually done, where it had gone, or whether keeping it had been brilliant or stupid. He couldn't tell the difference anymore, and that was the problem. He picked up the jar and turned it over in his hands, looking for clues he didn't know how to read. The glow was fading now, which either meant it was losing value or had already spent whatever made it worth keeping. Five people had bought the other jars without asking questions, which he'd taken as proof of his sales skills rather than their desperation or stupidity. He set the jar down and looked around his tent at the hundreds of objects he'd collected using the same two tests that had led him to keep a jar full of haunted cabbage in the first place. Something had to change. He couldn't keep guessing and calling it expertise, not when his treasures were walking out on their own. Mervin pulled a scrap of bark from his pocket and scratched a single word onto his sorting table: "Learn." Duchess hopped out of the tent and settled into her trough outside, which gave Mervin the silence he needed to think. He walked back inside and stared at the broken jar on his table. The crack ran straight through the glass like a path he should have seen coming. He'd kept the jar because it glowed and smelled like gold coins, which meant his two tests had told him exactly nothing about what lived inside or what would happen when it got out. Mervin set the jar on the highest shelf where he could see it every time he walked in. It would stay there as a reminder that he didn't know enough, and that keeping treasures he couldn't understand was the same as keeping problems he couldn't solve.