Liana Flowersoul's pupils contracted. "You've always been at his side—why don't you just take it back yourself?"
Elaina Cloud smiled. "You help me get it back. You control my physical body now, so you hold leverage over me. That way, as sisters, we can truly work together, and you won't have to doubt me anymore."
Liana Flowersoul was half-convinced, half-skeptical.
Elaina Cloud's eyes darted. She smiled and said, "Besides, it's nearly impossible for me to snatch it back from him. If he tries to summon my soul with my corpse, my consciousness in this body won't last—I'd die in one move. That's why I need you to go instead."
"That's your real plan, isn't it?"
Liana Flowersoul's gaze flickered. "You have disciples in this Grand Void expedition too, don't you? Why not send one of them to do it?"
Elaina Cloud sighed, tears shimmering in her eyes. She said mournfully, "You have no idea how strong that little troublemaker is. My disciples are no match for him at all. From what I know of him, they'd just end up dead, let alone succeed in taking my body back from him."
Liana Flowersoul recalled last night, when Quinn Shepherd triggered the Flame-Venerable Imprint, and couldn't help feeling a chill.
If not for the sisters' quick thinking and their use of Home's End divine arts to hide, they might have ended up like Pan Chun, Jin Xiu, You Fang, and the others—buried in this city!
The Flame-Venerable Imprint was terrifying, but fortunately the Home's End divine arts were ingenious in their own right. Most crucially, no one has yet cracked the Home's End Dao to this day.
It was precisely because of the unique properties of the Home's End divine arts that the sisters survived last night's upheaval.
Liana Flowersoul had fought Quinn Shepherd once before—she'd broken four of his arms. She was confident she could defeat him and reclaim Madam Yuanmu's body. But Quinn's real terror isn't just his strength; it's his knack for turning anything at hand into a weapon, like the Flame-Venerable Imprint last night.
"Get ready to retrieve my body from the Ghost Ship—then you can trade it for your own."
Liana Flowersoul swept her sleeves and left. "And one more thing—don't forget, you're Vast-Sky Venerable's own mother. Stop calling that little troublemaker 'little troublemaker' all the time! Have some dignity!"
Elaina Cloud was furious, but then suddenly burst out laughing. In a flash, her figure vanished from the Creator city.
"Sister, you're dignified, the model of motherhood for all the world—but a bit of a fool. Hehe, you go try to snatch my body, then I'll kill you and take it back myself. That's the mantis stalking the cicada, unaware of the oriole behind!"
The Grand Void was vast. Quinn Shepherd and Logan Cross walked for several days and still couldn't find that city.
"I wonder if that dragon you visualized got blown up?" Logan Cross thought of the divine dragon that got them exposed to the Empress sisters, and couldn't help asking.
Quinn Shepherd was checking the spirit herbs in his Glutton Dragon Pouch. Hearing this, he shook his head. "It was born of visualization. In a place like the Grand Void, it can't die."
Logan Cross was taken aback and probed, "Are you saying the divine dragon you visualized could survive the Flame-Venerable's divine arts? That's impossible! You don't have that kind of power."
Quinn Shepherd took out some spirit herb seeds and scattered them on the ground. With a quick spell, the seeds sprouted and grew at lightning speed, transforming the area ahead into a medicinal herb field.
"It can't survive, but it will revive."
As he worked his magic, Quinn explained, "The Grand Void has this bizarre trait—anything you visualize and create here will shatter, but then reassemble itself. That's how the Grand Void monsters work. They revive using the divine sense of the entire Grand Void world. So I figure, that divine dragon probably died in the city, but it'll borrow the Grand Void's divine sense to come back. After all, the whole Grand Void was imagined into existence by the Creators' divine sense. As long as the Grand Void remains, these visualized creatures have a constant supply of divine sense to resurrect. Of course, once they're outside the Grand Void, they're much easier to kill."
When the herbs ripened, he started harvesting them, storing the yield for later use.
Logan Cross watched his technique—it was as skilled as any herbalist, but when Quinn roasted and refined the herbs, he looked every bit the apothecary. Logan mused, "Quinn's Overlord Body sure has learned a lot of random stuff."
These days, Quinn Shepherd had been injured many times, so his herb stores were running low. Logan Cross was an even bigger drain—he needed tons of spirit herbs to heal the damage to his Heaven Palace.
"Even though I only visualized that divine dragon, my divine sense went into the Grand Void. So now the Grand Void has enough divine sense to make a dragon. There must be some law of conservation of divine sense in this world. That's why, even if it dies, the Grand Void brings it back."
Quinn finished packing up the herbs and continued on his way, brimming with confidence. "Once it's revived, it might even chase us down. Right now, it's probably following our trail. Everything that's happened since we got here has proved my theory. I'm almost always right."
He thought of Elaina Cloud and Liana Flowersoul—the two sisters—and his eye twitched, suddenly less sure of himself.
He'd guessed wrong about those two.