Nothing like a hint of danger to bring two people (people?) closer together and reveal their true feelings. With a sudden surge of supernatural occurrences, our main leads have quite a lot on their plates. Our gumiho realizes just how high the stakes are, and it brings him to an important decision, while our strong-willed college girl has to wrangle with jealousy, betrayal, and heartbreak.
EPISODES 7-8 WEECAP
Careful everyone, a supernatural killer is on the loose — Hye-sun warns our gumiho, and it’s a warning he does well to heed. All the random women we have seen hovering around Woo-yeo are murdered (this played out so cleverly!), so it’s only logical to expect cute, bead-holding Lee Dam to be next.
While Hye-sun and Woo-yeo try to protect Dam and the precious fox bead, Dam herself is clueless about the danger. Her biggest problem is the fact that she’s discovered Woo-yeo’s first love via portrait, and she’s worried that he still loves her. She’s even more worried because the woman seems to be very much alive and running a flower shop the two walk past often (*waves at Jung So-min again and tells her to go back to her own drama*).
The plot line with the supernatural creature hunting Dam resolves pretty quickly — but first, to my utter amusement, we see this creature shapeshifting and lurking about — only for it to be revealed as a fluffy Persian cat. It stares into the window ominously at Woo-yeo, and skulks around. Very dangerous enemy.
Thankfully, Hye-sun is better at security than she is at understanding Korean. She not only protects Dam on campus, but she quickly finds the creature. Woo-yeo shows up shortly, and they soon learn that the mysterious cat isn’t the baddie after all! It’s just good ol’ Go Kyung-pyo as a mountain spirit who has been protecting, not hunting, Dam.
He’s also here to warn Woo-yeo what will happen if he doesn’t turn human before he hits his 1,000 years of life. I’m glad they addressed this. It’s good to know, and it adds a hell of a sense of urgency — he needs human energy and he needs it fast, or he’s going to turn into this evil beast they know as a maegu.
As mentioned earlier, the concurrent — and conflicting — plotlines going on at this point in the story are contrasted for a really great effect. Dam is falling deeper for Woo-yeo at every turn despite her best attempts not to, and who can blame the girl (I mean, she’s got Woo-yeo flashing her happy smile when he spots her from across the street).
While Dam is trying to keep a lid on her crush and keep him from seeing Flower Shop Girl, he’s trying to protect her from imminent death. Coincidentally, both become the same thing, since the evil maegu that’s killing all these women (and after the bead) has taken the form of Flower Shop Girl. And it’s kinda scary!
Woo-yeo is a good man to have in a fight. He keeps suuuuper close tabs on Dam, and when the maegu shapeshifts into him and closes in on Dam while she’s studying all night at the library, Woo-yeo makes short work of it. After a cool fight sequence, he kills the maegu and keeps everyone safe — but it’s also enough for him to realize that he needs to change his plans to become human.
Woo-yeo decides that the fox bead must be removed from Dam. It’s quite a moment. He confesses to her that he lied, and knew how to remove the bead all along. Then he warns her that she won’t remember anything. Poor Dam is utterly lost in the moment, though, because even though Woo-yeo just revealed a huge betrayal, he’s also leaning in towards her, and she’s utterly frozen, with tears streaming down her face. The fox bead is exchanged. The contract is over. Nooooooo!
After that moment, it feels like we start the next episode in phase two of the story. We meet Dam again, waking up back in her bed, living her old life. Everything seems back to normal and forgotten — except it’s not. There’s this lingering, leftover sadness in her, and we soon realize that she hasn’t forgotten Woo-yeo at all. She tries to cover it up with all the chicken and alcohol she can, but she remembers all too well.
It’s time for the smitten Sun-woo to return and try to fill up the space in her heart. Thanks to “help” from each of their siblings, the two go on a date. Despite his confession, Dam later makes it clear that someone else is in her heart… and that someone hears her.
Post-contract Woo-yeo isn’t much better off than Dam. In fact, rather than keep his distance, he turns up on campus as the new history professor. Everyone is swooning over him — except Dam, whose broken heart you can feel a mile away. This professorship is convenient, though, because it puts Woo-yeo back in her everyday life like never before. And so, he not only confirms that Dam remembers everything (that strong mind just like her mother haha), but that she has feelings for him.
It’s an interesting turn we take here, that Woo-yeo keeps putting himself in Dam’s path despite removing the bead and trying to make a clean break. In other words, he realizes that he likes her, and the thought seems to catch him off guard. I would argue that he already knew he liked her and just wasn’t willing to see it (hence the insistence on their “family” bond). But now — now he knows.