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The next morning. Marli’s eyes were sunken from staying up late reading. After changing clothes, washing her face, and eating a hearty breakfast, she left her room.

Marli lived, ate, and slept on the lowest floor of the witch’s tower. The so-called ‘witch’s room’—where she kept her books, ingredients, and now, a fairy—was at the very top.

“Oh, right.”

Just as she was about to head up the stairs, Marli went back outside.

She had to feed the fairy. A fairy’s staple diet consisted of morning dew and fresh flower nectar. However, with the sun already high in the sky, the dew had long since evaporated. Feeling too lazy to look for anything else, Marli simply picked whatever wildflowers she could find, grabbed her drinking water and headed upstairs.

Whether from running around so much yesterday or lack of sleep, her body and eyelids felt heavy. Marli stood blankly on the slow-moving spiral staircase, waiting for it to carry her all the way to the top of the tower.

“Yaaawn—”

She opened the door and yawned widely. The sunlight streaming in through the window made the dust particles in the air visible. As she approached the cage, Marli waved her hand in an attempt to dislodge the dust.

“Hey, fairy.”

Prim, who had been sleeping wrapped up in the scrap of cloth Marli had given him, sat up groggily.

Marli filled a bottle cap with water and placed it in the cage. Thirsty, Prim grabbed the cap with both hands and gulped down the water. However, the water, which had been fetched from the stream two days ago, was neither clean nor cold.

“Tastes awful…”

“What are you, a prince? Just drink it.”

Marli picked the flowers out of the handful of weeds she had gathered, tossing the rest aside. Prim grabbed a flower and sucked the nectar from it. Marli watched the fairy, clearly dissatisfied. She’d thought she would become rich overnight by brewing an elixir from a male fairy, but she hadn’t expected these kinds of obstacles. She considered selling the fairy instead, but that seemed wasteful when his essence could be harvested endlessly.

The wildflowers Marli had picked were all rather shabby. As Prim finished the third flower, Marli spoke up abruptly.

“Hey, Prim.”

“Yeah?”

“I looked it up in a book yesterday. If your essence is… that kind of bodily fluid, can’t you just extract it yourself?”

Marli frowned deeply as she finished. No matter how small her captive was, it was still awkward to say out loud.

The book she had read late into the night wasn’t her sixth-great-grandmother’s book on fairy ecology; there wasn’t a word about fairy reproduction in it. Instead, Marli had ended up reading a famous scholar’s book about human reproduction. Apparently, a healthy adult male could produce it every day. Fairies were ‘little humans’, after all. Surely it was the same for fairies?

But Prim, looking sulky, dashed her hopes.

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“I’ve never done it before.”

“Then just do it.”

Prim shot her a sullen glare while clutching a tiny wildflower. What was she going to do, glare right back? Marli, for her part, lifted her chin in defiance. But instead of snapping back, the fairy mumbled awkwardly.

“Well, you need to… have a reaction for that. I’ve never had one.”

“What?”

“Seriously—ah, damn it… I’ve never even had an er*ction!”

When Marli still didn’t seem to get it, Prim shouted in frustration.

Marli blinked in confusion. What was he talking about? Had she caught a male fairy who was impotent?

She might not have external reproductive organs or any s*xual experience herself, but she knew the basics. Whether human or animal, any fully grown male should have the instinct to reproduce.

Her thoughts went that far, and then anxiety crept in as she asked again,

“Are you sure you’re an adult?”

“I am an adult!”

Prim forgot that she was a witch and snapped back. From a human perspective, he might have seemed insignificant, but by fairy standards, he was quite the catch; a queue of females had formed just to mate with him.

But that was only by fairy standards. Marli eyed the unimpressive little creature from every angle and replied in a flat voice.

“Then why not?”

“Because I don’t feel like it. What do you want me to do about it?”

Prim turned his back on her and resumed sucking nectar from the flower. He had left home in the first place because of the mating ritual.

In fairy society, all the children are raised together, regardless of their parents’ identities. As they grow up, they eventually find mates and start their own lives once they reach adulthood. Prim, unable to find a mate, was the last male left in the communal nursery.

As he’d told the witch, he’d never felt that kind of urge. Needless to say, this made him the butt of every joke among the other fairies.

However, Marli had no interest in the delicate psyche of a virgin fairy. To her, it was akin to a goose that laid golden eggs becoming constipated — she needed a solution. She picked up a blade of grass and prodded the fairy on the back.

“Hey.”

But the fairy didn’t budge. Annoyed, Marli wiggled the fuzzy grass up and down.

“Hey, hey, hey, hey.”

“What!”

Prim twisted away in irritation, his glare surprisingly fierce for someone so tiny. Of course, to Marli, it just looked pitiful. She kept poking his face with the tip of the grass and continued.

“You know you’re completely at my mercy right now, right?”

Prim stuck out his lips in a sulky pout. Marli nodded toward the cabinet, where, just like yesterday, rows of specimen jars lined the shelves.

“You think I’ll just let you go if you say you can’t make essence?”

“So what am I supposed to do…”

Marli poked him right in the middle of his body with a blade of grass. His p*nis was so small that the bristles of the grass almost completely covered it. She gave the stem a little shake and declared firmly,

“If you can’t get this up, you die.”

No matter how clueless she seemed, she was still a witch. Prim was scared out of his wits but refused to show it. He just pouted, then muttered in a voice so small it was barely more than a mosquito’s whine.

“…Damn it.”

“What was that?”

“Fine, I get it.”

“If you don’t want to die, you’d better come up with a solution.”

Marli tossed the grass aside and stood up. The most important ingredient for the ‘special elixir’ was ‘fairy essence’, but many other materials were needed too. She decided to prepare the rest first. If the hopeless fairy still couldn’t manage it by then, she would just sell him.

And so began the dangerous relationship between witch and fairy.