Adam and Samuel were reading side by side. Adam was also taking notes. This was another alchemy book that Constantine had given him. They were going to have a brewing session later in the afternoon and Adam wanted to impress Constantine with his knowledge.

Samuel stole a glance at Adam. The Naga was lying on his stomach and his tail was curled up. With how concentrated, he was on taking the notes, Samuel figured that he was giving his all.

Samuel, seeing that he was now the boss mob to a herb growing dungeon, was reading a botanical encyclopedia. But he found the process dry and boring. He sighed, and Adam turned to look at him.

"Tired?" Asked the Naga, pen close to the paper.

"No. It is just so that this is so dry," complained Samuel, pointing at the book.

"Would you like to read my notes instead?" Suggested Adam, and he uncurled his tail and slithered to a far-off corner where a chest was propped up against the stone wall.

He opened it and took out a leather-bound notebook. Slithering back to Samuel, he handed it over.

"I mostly wrote only the useful things. How to grow the plants and how to harvest them. Also, what they were used for," Samuel took the notebook and opened it. He found the sketch of a Chamomile. There was an arrow that showed which parts were used for what, and a brief description below.

"Thank you," said Samuel, and they returned to their reading. Samuel found himself spending more time on the sketches than on the description. But he finished the notebook and looked at the chest. "Can I take another one? I finished this one."

Adam nodded without looking up, and Samuel walked to the chest. He opened it and saw a bottomless charm on the lid. There was also a table of content on it, and he pressed his finger on the words. A notebook appeared on top of the others, and he found it was the same as the one the title of which he had traced with his fingers. 

Looking through the table of content, he searched for something that stroke his fancy. Finally, one, called One hundred fungi for the beginner botanist, caught his eyes and he took it out.

Just like the last notebook, there were sketches inside, but they were of a far lesser quality than the former notebook. Come to think of it, the writing was more uneven, too. Samuel took the notebook and went to Adam.

"How old were you when you wrote this?" He showed the Naga the title of the notebook and Adam took it off his hands. He flipped all the pages and then showed the last one to Samuel. It read:

Finished by Adam, age five.

"This is the first notebook I made. Tine had just taught me how to read and write. He even taught me how to talk, actually. And he told me that I can take my education in my own hands. So, he gave me the notebook and taught me how to make notes," finished Adam with a found smile. Samuel's eyebrows rose. Adam hadn't known how to talk before the necromancer found him?

"Why didn't you know how to talk?" Adam looked down on his notebook.

"Well, it was not like there was anyone to teach me, before Tine. I lived alone and my experience with people were the adventurers who came in my dungeon looking for treasure," that sounded lonely to Samuel. He couldn't even begin to imagine how Adam had lived before the necromancer had found him.

"Wait, who gave you your name?" That was something Samuel couldn't understand. Did the Naga name himself?

"Tine did, of course. He named me after someone who had been precious to him, but died long ago," Samuel bit the inside of his cheek. It was twisted for someone who had all but raised someone to suddenly want in his pants, so to speak.

"Look, Adam, you do know that these kinds of things are done by parents, right?" Samuel spoke slowly, so he would get his point across.

"So?" Adam tilted his head to the side in that adorable manner of his, and Samuel couldn't resist the urge to place a hand on the Naga's shoulder.

"And it is wrong to have such feelings for your parents,"  finished Samuel, and Adam made an oh sound.

"But, Tine and I are not related at all,"  Adam thought that it was silly of Samuel to claim that they were. After all, Adam and Constantine weren't even the same species.

"Yes, but he still raised you," argued back Samuel. Honestly, it wasn't his business. But he still wanted to shine some light on the Naga.

"There is nothing wrong with my feelings," Adam huffed and turned back to his notebook, beginning to write again. Samuel knew a dismissal when he saw it. He shrugged and went back to his own corner and began to read.

While the writing was uneven, the typos were minimal. Then again, Adam's writing in that other notebook had still had misspelling of certain closely written words.

Samuel would have said that Adam simply didn't have the practice, if the chest wasn't full to the brim with notebooks. Samuel took his pen and began correcting the notes. The more he worked, the more patterns in the mistakes he saw.

He was beginning to lean to the fact that the necromancer had never taken to correcting the Naga's notes before. So, Adam had learned some words wrong.

But the explanations themselves were engaging and more interesting than the dry encyclopedia. And, while the sketches were croaky, they were still better than nothing.

When Samuel was done, he sipped mana into the notebook and all the corrected words replaced the mistaken ones. Now, the notes looked like they were written by two different people. Samuel stood and took another notebook. Determined to edit them all and learn all about the plants that could be grown in this dungeon in the process.