Set in a fictional country called Daeho that does not exist in history or on maps, it is about the love and growth of young mages as they overcome their twisted fates due to a forbidden magic spell known as the "alchemy of souls", which allows souls to switch bodies. It follows the story of an elite assassin named Naksu, whose soul is accidentally trapped inside the weak body of Mu Deok—Jang Uk's servant from a powerful and noble mage family in the country. The young master of the Jang Family, Jang Uk, holds a dark secret about his scandalous birth. He wants the formidable assassin to help change his destiny.
This tv show contains 23 potentially triggering events.
In one of the early episodes, the soul of an entity gets transported into a dead dog, bringing the dog back to life. In episode 16 that entity is expelled from the body of the dog, meaning the dog is dead again. The body of the dog is covered quickly
kind of: a dog-spirit is sort of a pet to a character, then it is dispelled from the dog vessel leaving a dead dog. Later, someone 'gets rid of' someone else's pet turtle and the owner briefly thinks it might be dead (the turtle is fine, we see him again later and he's reunited with the owner)
Someone commits suicide with a knife (we find out later he is alive). Later in the same episode someone else commits suicide using magic, they turn to ash.
Many people in the show are sucked of their life as their energy is “eaten” by soul shifters. They die a horrible death in this way as they are consumed.
Several times in Season 1: once by thugs trying to extract money they are owed, and another by a woman angry at a supposed desecration of a memorial. S2E2 a young woman is slapped hard by her mother.
A woman is transferred to a different body against her will. Due to the circumstances in the show she is unable to go back to her old body. She is intensely unhappy and angry to be stuck in an “ugly” body that is not hers and obsesses and has meltdowns about it.
EP. 9 someone notices that a caged bird has died. It doesn’t die on screen, you can just barely see a form at the bottom of the cage. EP. 13 a fish is caught, cooked, and eaten
I’m EP. 4 there is what looks to be a dead dog, whose head is covered in straw (often used for dead bodies). He is possessed by a type of dog spirit and appears to come back to life now as the dog spirit. EP. 6 there is a dead pheasant in a basket.
A fly and a bee buzz around someone in different occurrences. What looks like live mealworms are fed to a bird. A CGI worm infects multiple people. In S2E8 a spider is shown towards the end in a location shot.
This is a difficult one - someone swaps souls to a different body and is shown making love with that person’s wife. She is unaware it isn’t her husband so he violates her consent in doing this, even though she looks willing in the scene.
Someone is burned but doesn’t die, they are heavily scarred. A monster also catches fire in another scene and douses himself but has some damage to his face.
Soul shifters often degrade into monsters, with blue skin and black eyes, and suck the life out of humans in order to survive. This process is shown and causes considering pain & fear to the shrivelling victims. Soul shifters petrify into rock when they die.
Several parents are shown dying in flashbacks, of childbirth and violence mainly. In EP. 1 an adult son who has been corrupted by an evil force kills his own mother.
People use “alchemy of souls” to swap or move souls into different bodies. This looks as though the person is possessed because a different soul is in their body, sometimes this is done against their will.
A priceless magical artifact is shattered. The artifact’s many pieces are later glued back together again, but it no longer serves the same function, the magic that it housed moves elsewhere.
Several scenes take place in a hospital location, as well as medical care that takes place in other locations. It is a fantasy world with no modern medicine so it looks different from a modern hospital.
SPOILER: A woman’s fetus dies inside her (shown in flashback) and she convinces someone to use magic to save the child. However, it is later revealed that instead of the child coming back to life, the soul of a powerful mage inhabited the body instead for her own purpose of preventing a future event. So she did in fact lose the real soul of her child due to the late term miscarriage.
There is one unrequited love between side characters. The man is much older thanks to magic but looks similar in age to the woman. Nothing ever happens between them besides some conversation and giving of gifts.
There is a lot of sword fighting, including assassinations & people being slashed or impaled. The blood isn’t too graphic, but slash wounds and burns are shown several times.