**Chapter 12: An Audience with a Parasite**
The summons came not as a request, but as an imperial decree. A high-ranking Papal Knight, his face grim and his spirit power thrumming with nervous energy, arrived at the guest manor.
He found Luo Yan seated in a carved armchair, observing Hu Liena as she meticulously performed the art of brewing tea, her every movement filled with a desperate need for his approval.
"Senior," the Knight announced, his voice stiff with formality as he knelt on one knee. "Her Holiness, the Pope, grants you an audience in the Papal Throne Room."
Luo Yan didn't even look at the knight. His gaze remained on Hu Liena. "It's about time," he murmured, a statement that held a universe of condescending patience. He stood, his movements fluid and unhurried.
Hu Liena immediately put down the teapot and moved to his side, her heart hammering against her ribs. This was it. The meeting of two supreme beings. And she was to be a witness.
The walk to the Papal Palace was a stark contrast to the earlier procession. Gone was the public avenue, replaced by the hallowed, silent halls of the palace's inner sanctum.
The air grew colder, heavier. Towering archways and obsidian pillars seemed to watch them, imbued with the psychic weight of generations of absolute power.
The guards they passed were members of the Papal Guard, every one a Soul Douluo, their faces hidden behind merciless golden masks.
Yet, even they could not hide the tension radiating from them as Luo Yan passed. They felt his presence not as a threat to be fought, but as a law of nature to be weathered.
Finally, they arrived before two colossal doors of gold and obsidian, engraved with the epic saga of the Seraphim God vanquishing a host of demons.
With a low, groaning sound, the doors swung open, revealing the cavernous abyss of the Papal Throne Room.
The room was a masterpiece of intimidation. A long, black carpet stretched like a river of night towards a distant, elevated throne.
The air was frigid, and shadows clung to the vaulted ceilings like sleeping beasts.
And upon that throne, sat the Pope.
Luo Yan's eyes, which had regarded everything in this world with a detached curiosity, finally focused with genuine interest.
Bibi Dong was, by any standard, a being of breathtaking beauty. She wore magnificent, form-fitting papal robes of black and gold that accentuated a figure of sublime perfection—a slender waist, generous curves, and long, elegant limbs. Her skin was as pale and flawless as polished marble.
A cascade of long, purple hair fell around her shoulders, framing a face of aristocratic, almost cruel, perfection. High cheekbones, full lips painted a deep crimson, and a pair of bewitching, intelligent violet eyes that currently held the cold, detached power of a goddess.
Yet, Luo Yan saw more. Clinging to her like a shroud of spiritual filth, he saw the twisting, corrupting aura of the Rakshasa.
It was a parasitic energy, feeding on her soul's deepest wounds, tainting her magnificent presence with a subtle but undeniable stench of decay and resentment.
*What a magnificent vessel, utterly wasted on such a low-level parasite,* he thought with a flicker of annoyance. His goal was to claim this woman, and the first step was pest control.
Bibi Dong watched him approach, her violet eyes like chips of ice. She felt nothing from him, and that was the most terrifying thing of all.
To seize the initiative, to remind him—and herself—of who held the power in this room, she unleashed her will.
Her immense spiritual pressure, a psychic hammer forged from the will of a Pope and the power of a half-god, surged forward.
It was an invisible tsunami designed to crush the minds of her enemies, to force even a Limit Douluo to their knees in submission.
The wave of power washed over Luo Yan.
And vanished.
It did not hit a wall. It was not deflected. It simply flowed into him and ceased to exist, like a river pouring into a black hole.
There was no ripple, no feedback, just an endless, silent, terrifying void.
Bibi Dong gasped, an involuntary breach of her perfect composure. Her connection was severed.
For the first time in her life as Pope, her ultimate weapon of authority had been rendered utterly, comically impotently.
Luo Yan stopped in the center of the room, a casual distance from her throne. The faint, condescending smile returned to his face.
"An impressive greeting, Pope Bibi Dong," he said, his voice laced with amusement. "But a bit lacking."
Before she could form a reply, before her reeling mind could process the humiliation, Luo Yan acted. He didn't move. He didn't gesture. He simply spoke one word, a word imbued with the absolute authority of a Planetary Level 7 being imposing his reality.
"**Still.**"
The universe obeyed.
The dust motes dancing in the beams of light froze in place. The faint tremor of Hu Liena's terrified breathing, just inside the doorway, ceased. The very concept of time within the throne room was arrested, locked into a single, perfect moment. Only two beings were exempt: Luo Yan, the caster, and Bibi Dong, the subject of his attention, who found she couldn't move a muscle, her eyes locked forward in horrified paralysis.
Luo Yan's gaze sharpened, his dark eyes no longer looking at Bibi Dong, but *through* her, into the depths of her soul where the parasite resided. His pleasant expression vanished, replaced by one of cold, absolute disgust.
"How long will you hide in the shadows of this woman's pain, parasite?" his voice was no longer melodic. It was the grinding of glaciers, the sound of cosmic indifference. "Come out and face me, or I will extinguish the soul you cling to and erase you from existence."
A horrifying, guttural shriek of pure terror echoed, not in the room, but in the psychic space around Bibi Dong. A violent, shadowy purple energy was forcibly ripped from her spiritual sea. It coalesced beside her throne into a grotesque, vaguely feminine form—a twisted being of pure malice and shadow, with multiple arachnid-like limbs and eyes burning with ancient hatred. This was the divine projection of the Rakshasa God.
And it was trembling uncontrollably.
Luo Yan released a single, infinitesimal sliver of his true presence, aimed directly at the divine projection. The Rakshasa God felt it not as pressure, but as the sudden, undeniable truth of its own insignificance. It was an ant realizing that the mountain before it was, in fact, the foot of a being the size of a galaxy. Its very form flickered, threatening to collapse under the sheer weight of his existence.
"Listen closely, little god," Luo Yan stated, his voice a decree. "I have only two things to say to you."
He took a slow step forward, each footfall an epoch of dread for the cowering deity.
"First," he declared, his voice cutting through her divine arrogance, "this woman, Bibi Dong, is now **mine**. You will not harm her. You will not defile her. Her body, her mind, and her soul are my property."
The Rakshasa God recoiled as if struck.
"Second," Luo Yan continued, his tone dropping to a dangerous whisper, "you will immediately cease all corruption of her mind. Your petty manipulations, your whispers of hatred, your poison that festers in her memories—it all ends now. It disgusts me."
He paused, letting the commands sink in. "Pass on your inheritance if you wish. I do not care about your pathetic power. But her will is to be her own, and her soul is to be left untouched. Am I understood?"
The Rakshasa God, pinned by an authority it could not comprehend, every particle of its divine essence screaming in terror, could only manage a single, frantic nod.
"Good," Luo Yan said, his cold expression melting back into one of casual indifference. With a thought, he allowed the terrified divine projection to dissolve back into the ether, fleeing back to its divine realm.
And with another thought, he spoke a second word.
"**Continue.**"
Time snapped back into place.
Hu Liena took a sharp breath, her mind fuzzy for a second, unsure why she had been holding it. The dust motes resumed their dance.
But for Bibi Dong, the world had been reborn.
In an instant, a pressure that had been clamped around her mind for over twenty years—a suffocating blanket of induced hatred, paranoia, and obsessive rage—was gone. The constant, maddening whispers of the Rakshasa fell silent. The clarity was so sudden, so absolute, it was physically jarring. It was like emerging from a deep, dark ocean into the crisp, clean air. She could *think*. She could *feel*. Her own emotions, not the ones amplified and twisted by her god.
Her eyes widened. She looked at Luo Yan, her mind racing at impossible speeds. No one had seen it. No one had heard it. But she had *felt* it. A fundamental part of her being, a divine shackle, had just been shattered by this man's will alone.
Just then, a frantic, terrified whisper echoed in the deepest part of her newly-cleansed mind. It was the voice of her god, the Rakshasa.
*"Do not provoke him! Obey him! That man... he is not of this reality! He is... an end!"*
Bibi Dong stared at Luo Yan, and for the first time, the coldness in her eyes was replaced by something else entirely. Awe. Shock. And a strange, bewildering flicker of... gratitude. He had not attacked her. He had freed her.
`[Bibi Dong - Favorability Increased: -10 (Wary Adversary) -> 15 (Intrigued and Grateful)]`
`[System Analysis: Target's primary mental corruption has been forcibly removed. Her true personality is now accessible. Her perception of the host has shifted from 'threat' to 'unfathomable liberator'.]`
Bibi Dong took a slow, deep breath of clean air she hadn't tasted in decades. She looked down from her throne at the handsome, smiling man who had forced a god to its knees with two words. The question she had been about to ask as a Pope, a demand for identity, was now meaningless. She asked it again, but this time, it came from the woman named Bibi Dong.
Her voice, no longer brittle with power but soft with genuine, fearful curiosity, echoed in the silent throne room.
"Who... *are* you?"
To be Continue.