Credit: Netflix

Nothing really comes close to the fantastical horror The East Palace brings on its coattails, which opens on Netflix with the back-to-back deaths of princes plagued by a terrible curse.

The K-drama tells the story of Gu-cheon, a ghost-slayer who can penetrate human and ghostly realms, and Saeng-gang, a court lady who can hear spirits and is the illegitimate daughter of the palace’s king, who are summoned to get rid of the pond spirit AKA won-gwi haunting and swiping the royal bloodline.

It all started 30 years ago when the now-queen dowager, Jang Young-nam, accused a court lady, increasingly favoured by the king back in the day, of mingling with a royal guard, and executed her for bearing his child. Driven by vengeance, the court lady cursed the palace at the time of her death, promising to return as won-gwi to end the royal bloodline. As a result, every royal prince has died following her death, except for one: the present-day king Cho Seung-woo, born to a different concubine.

While the power struggle between the king and the queen dowager never really subsided, when his sons started greeting the Grim Reaper like his brothers, Young-nam saw this as an opportunity to adopt a crown prince from an outside family. It was ultimately when his last living son, Prince Yeongan, collapsed that he summoned Gu-cheon and Saeng-gang, binding the former by the condition of destroying the won-gwi if he wanted to leave the palace alive. So, does Gu-cheon die or make it out alive?

What happens to Gu-cheon at the end of The East Palace?

Gu-cheon descends into the Realm of Gwi in The East Palace, tracks down the pond spirit, and ultimately severs the resentment binding her to the human realm with a jujube branch struck by lightning. Even then, Saeng-gang doesn’t stop hearing the spirits, who keep saying that the real ak-gwi behind the curse plaguing the palace is none other than the king. However, it takes Prince Yeongan’s death for the pair to realise that the curse hasn’t been lifted.

This makes Saeng-gang join the dots to realise that the person who has stood to benefit from the deaths of the princes is his grandmother and the king’s biological mother. In fact, having witnessed the court lady’s execution and her threat, she seized the opportunity to use the curse as a smokescreen to poison every prince before her son, who stood in the line of succession.

The king knew all about it, and so did Saeng-gang’s mother, who helped her grandmother carry out a cycle of murderous sin. But, realising her mother would be a liability, her grandmother also killed her. However, the culprit behind the present-day killings is not Saeng-gang’s grandmother, but the king, who inherited the throne.

The king killed his own son, blaming it on the pond spirit, yet again. However, the crown prince’s resentment turned him into an ak-gwi, who then killed his little brother, wiping out the royal lineage. Since an ak-gwi has no point of return, the only way to defeat it is for Gu-cheon to destroy its soul forever. So, as Saeng-gang and Gu-cheon ready themselves for the ultimate showdown, a gwi-mae shares a premonition about Gu-cheon’s death.

Amidst the tense confrontations, when the king ultimately apologises, it allows Gu-cheon an opening, despite knowing that annihilating an ak-gwi’s soul would mean turning into one. He does what he has to do and turns into an ak-gwi. However, when the primordial gwi-mae arrives to fulfil his end of the bargain, shackling him to the spirit realm, the chain moves and Gu-cheon prepares for one last fight, only to find himself in the human world, attached by an invisible chain tying him to the spirit world.