Ron Does Stuff

This wasn’t the original plan — I had intended to ease myself into blogging and just maybe do a post per week, but since this is an ongoing series with new episodes premiering weekly, I need to catch up if I don’t want to spoil anything for myself. So here we are with episode 2!

In the last episode, Songrim gets attacked, Jang Wook corners Naksu, and we discover why there’s no telltale blue dot on Mu-deok’s body. This episode gets right into where we left off as Jang Wook asks Naksu to be his teacher.

Some background that I realize I didn’t provide in the previous post — Jang Wook can’t perform magic because his father, Geon, blocked his ~gate of energy~, making it impossibly for him to perform magic. Nobody wants to unblock it since everybody’s afraid of his father, and Jang Wook has decided that somebody as out of control as Naksu would be the only one reckless enough to teach him.

Unfortunately for him, Naksu isn’t really into it. Fortunately for him, Naksu doesn’t have a choice, at least at the moment. Both Seo Yool and Dang-gu find them, and if she doesn’t play along her whole revenge plot won’t get off the ground. There’s some comedy attempted her but to be honest, either the cultural nuances aren’t familiar to me — probably — or it just falls flat.

We do get even more flashbacks to Naksu and Seo Yool’s past together, and I am already feeling bad for Seo Yool because you know the second lead in K-dramas always get the raw end of the deal. At least I can steel myself for what’s about to come!

The action then shifts to the people chasing after the invaders, and it appears that they have a spy inside of Songrim, as only one of the ~nobles~ are capable of breaking the barrier that allowed the intruders in and out of the fortress.

While the adults are chasing each other, three of the Four Seasons are where Naksu’s body used to be, trying to figure out what Naksu’s plan could be while Naksu’s in the room itself. While Jang Wook and Dang-gu have a little fun with the situation, Seo Yool acts the noble gentleman when Naksu calls herself a monster as subterfuge and you just know that Seo Yool is going to get his heart broken down the line.

Dang-gu and Seo Yool are called away, leaving Naksu and Jang Wook alone, and Jang Wook reiterates his desire to have Naksu as his master. I hope they do something with this master set-up because you can do a lot of interesting things with this dynamic.

Naksu tells Jang Wook that she can’t do anything about his ~gate of energy~ until she gets her sword, but even before they can come up with a plan on how to go about doing that, the two of them are called to Songrim’s training center, along with everybody else. Obviously, the powers-that-be are looking to find who the spy is.

It’s here at the training center that Jin Cho-yeon finally makes an appearance. She’s played by Arin, one-half of Akkong MC from Music Bank, which gives me the opportunity to include this video because I can.

It’s implied that there’s a past between Jang Wook and Cho-yeon, but that’s set aside for now as we’re introduced to the Gwigu, which can detect if magic has been performed. For a moment we get a tense moment where the Gwigu seems to have discovered Naksu, but it turns out that there’s yet another soul shifter in the training center and it’s the one it goes after.

This then leads to a fight scene with the soul shifter and some guards, before Seo Yool steps up and quickly dispatches him. Got to say, I haven’t seen any of Minhyuk’s acting work before this one, and he’s not bad in this one! He does buttoned-up good boy with an edge really well!

While that earlier soul shifter was easily dispatched, it looks like the Gwigu isn’t done looking for soul shifters, as it has found Naksu and starts chasing her around the compound while everyone else is elsewhere. In order to save her, Jang Wook destroys the Gwigu pottery making him look like even more of an asshole to Cho-yeon, who he apparently broke an engagement off.

That action gets him punished, and we find out from Dang-gu and Seo Yool that Jang Wook is so weak that he could literally die from being exposed to extreme heat and cold for too long. With Jang Wook unable to stop her for now, Naksu uses it as an opportunity to escape. She does promise she won’t kill Jang Wook if they ever meet again, so that’s something!

At this point in the episode, it shifts to the adults of the show, with the head of the Jin clan and Jang Wook’s uncle being summoned by the new king. It appears that Jin Mu — he seems like the king’s advisor — has discovered and killed Naksu’s men and recovered her body, and the king wants to reward him for it and give him the position of Gwangju. No idea what that it is but the current Gwangju is Jang Wook’s dad. Since it was earlier revealed that Jin Mu is actually the one shifting souls and the one that led the attack on Songrim, I’m guessing he’s actually Geon who’s shifted his soul into who knows how many bodies.

While the adults are doing the Game of Thrones thing, Naksu has found her old home destroyed. She thinks Jin Mu did it because he thought she couldn’t shift souls, so se leaves a note telling him to look for the person selling a spirit plaque and that would be her. But due to a greedy colleague in the brothel where she’s hiding, Naksu fails to meet up with Jin Mu, which ends up being a good thing because Jin Mu was planning to kill her!

Naksu ends up watching her body burn, and while Jang Wook gives her a glimmer of hope by retrieving her sword for her, it turns out that she’s too weak to unsheathe. So just like any drama queen, she decides to drown herself in a lake. Cool!

Fortunately, the lake seems like it has magical traits of its own, as Naksu is now able to unsheathe her sword after trying to drown herself in it. But the effort takes so much of her energy that she ends up sent to Songrim’s infirmary, where Jang Wook nurses her back to health. It turns out that she can only unsheathe her sword if she’s got a source of energy like the lake, so she poisons him so that the adults in the room will be forced to open his ~gate of energy~ so that he can be healed. And it works!

Naksu now agrees to be Jang Wook’s master, and this has turned into a student/teacher – noona/dongsaeng romance.