Welp… Shu Sabi is the obvious mastermind.

Honestly, it really couldn’t have been anyone else. I was hoping it wasn’t her because it was so obvious that they might as well have titled the series “Help! Shu Sabi Is a Two-Faced, Curse-Wielding Villainess Who Set Up My Maiden Rival and Left Me for Dead.”

We have Sabi:

• Adopting Kougetsu
• Her learning forbidden magic from Kougetsu
• Planting the thought of “if only you were Reirin” in Kougetsu’s head
• Giving the Empress and Kougetsu those cursed incense gifts, with the latter delivered through Kin
• Her entire backstory
• Everyone else being either too useless, too inept, or too uninvolved to realistically pull this off
• And probably several other things I’m forgetting

Then we get the extra piece from Reirin: Sabi needed Reirin out of the way because she was preventing curse magic from working on the Kou clan. So by removing Reirin and putting Kougetsu in her place, Sabi effectively killed two birds with one stone.

Except… both Reirin and Kougetsu survived.

The other interesting piece is Kin stoking the flames of hatred while the Empress willingly made herself the target of that rage because she wanted Sabi to recover from the double-whammy of not becoming Empress and losing her child.

Except now that brilliant plan is starting to backfire spectacularly. Or maybe the Empress genuinely thinks she deserves it—or is willing to sacrifice herself for Sabi.

I’m still hoping there’s some kind of twist, especially given how important the body-swapping mechanic has been. But at this point, I think I have to agree with ReluctantlyZen: this anime just might not be that clever.

Which is a shame, because the premise is way more interesting than the mystery they’ve built around it.