This is a romance drama with some gothic fantasy elements. The production and acting was great and the story was very entertaining.

Caiwei was a young woman with a troubled past . She was a serious character who lived quietly as a coroner and inadvertently found herself mixed up in murder mystery. After the face swap, this characterization was completely gone. It's not that Ju Jing Yi (JJY) is a bad actress. She is typecast to play a specific character. So, herein lies the problem with characterization by JJY where she portrayed a variation of Fu Rong and Yunxi, instead of a solemn girl introduced by Zheng He Hui Zi. Curiously enough, her characterization of the original Shangguan Zhi was on point. The showrunners should've done a better job at coaching her about the role because she obviously can act outside her usual stereotype.

The romance was nicely written. Pen Yue's original obsession with Caiwei was a bit off-putting. But as he rediscovered the "new" and "improved" Shangguan Zhi (SZ), he slowly started falling in love with her. The writers did a good job showing the personality change, that SZ was no longer a mean-spirited woman, but a very nice person. I loved Pen Yue's and SZ's interactions and situations they were thrown in where Pen Yue gradually started seeing the differences between the old SZ and the new SZ drawing similarities between the new SZ and Caiwei. I also liked that Pen Yue went through internal struggle feeling guilt over the fact that he started developing feelings for SZ while still mourning his dead wife. Not to mention, the chemistry between the actors was amazing. This is one of the fewer romance dramas where adults act like actual adults, instead of awkward teenagers.

I did not love the ending. Some good characters were wasted just to draw an emotional reaction from the audience. And, instead of tying up all the loose ends, it ended on a giant cliff hanger not revealing who the actual mastermind was. Will this lead to a sequel or are we just supposed to wonder? Who knows.