Yi Qiang raised one eyebrow slightly in response before gesturing his assent. Seeing this, the Second Prince smiled even wider as he turned around, heading into the heavily-guarded room.

The archer followed him, unsure of what to expect.

Without a word, the Second Prince stood directly in the center of the teleportation circle, rolling his shoulders around in preparation for whatever was soon to come.

"All you have to do," he tossed a replica of the purple sphere to Yi Qiang, who deftly caught it. "Is crush this ball. Then, after a bit of... unpleasant spatial travel, you're exactly where you want to be! Simple, no?"

"I would hope so." Yi Qiang responded. Suddenly, a doubt occurred to him. "Will Shenyu be taken along with me?"

"Of course!" The prince replied. "You think that didn't occur to me? Don't worry, man! Look, worst-case scenario, your friend is left on some isolated spatial plane to play!"

The friendly man paled slightly at the glowing knife Yi Qiang summoned with Empyrean Dragon's Armaments, half-jokingly.

"For your sake, nothing better happen to Shenyu."

The sufficiently-intimated man regained his composure. "Naturally!"

With one last flamboyant bow, the prince crushed the purple sphere and disappeared silently - his teleportation evoked no disturbances in space or any other physical reactions.

I did not know what teleportation would look like, but that was rather far down on my list of possibilities.

  Yi Qiang shrugged and stood in the same spot the Second Prince had just disappeared on, bracing himself for what the man had seemed to imply was a rough process. The gem that served as a key was crushed easily in his hand, crumbling to dust despite the very small amount of force applied to it.

  And the moment the jewel was fully converted into powder, everything changed.

    Instantly, Yi Qiang's surrounding's turned black. He lost the feeling of any gravity or weight, and for that moment, every particle that made up Yi Qiang seemed to exist independently, aware of its neighbors but isolated from them.

   Then he fell.

  So drastic was the change that Yi Qiang was incapable of forming any coherent thought - from the black void he was first in for a moment so short he could barely collect sensory data to his current state, a time of movement so fast it seemed like his entire being would be ripped apart.

  Strangely enough, the feeling of weightlessness from the prior abyss persisted. In addition to that, all of Yi Qiang's preconception about how speed worked were broken - he was experiencing everything that would occur should he move at an incredible speed in the air in Ascend, but... he could distinctly feel that the area he was traveling through had no atmosphere. In other words, the empty space that he hurtled through at so intense a speed was just that - empty space. A void. A vacuum.

  Which, by all reasoning, should be impossible - even if he were traveling in a vacuum, there would be no reason for him to feel any different than if he were staying still. It was clear to Yi Qiang that, where he was, there were no outside forces, no materials, just him, the empty space, and Shenyu.

  Shenyu.

With a start, Yi Qiang opened his eyes, which he hadn't realized he shut, and looked to his right shoulder. His sinking feeling, borne from the fact that the archer could not feel the weight of the hatchling where it was prior to him crushing the stone, was confirmed when his mind caught up to his eyes.

  Shenyu wasn't there.

  It took an instant for Yi Qiang to reconcile everything that had happened in the single flash of time since after he used the teleportation circle.

  He was in a black void, still. Then he was in a... white void, and he was moving so quickly that, even as he thought, pain tore throughout his body as if his sinew and skin and marrow were being pulled apart.

  That was nothing, however, and Yi Qiang had more important priorities.

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  He looked around the empty space even as his eyes burned in a perpetual cycle of drying up from his movement, then tearing up as a response, tears which were soon dragged away, only to begin the cycle again. He had just estabished it was white, so by that reasoning, Shenyu should be easy to find, his golden scales shining brilliantly in the pale plains...

  There!

Yi Qiang's keen eyes, caught a gleam, so far in the distance it may have been the sun in the material realm, untold distances away. They focused, however, through the constant irritations of his velocity, and made out a shape.

  A young, small golden dragon, curled up in a ball.

   Seeing this, Yi Qiang realized the obvious. A switch flipped in his mind, and it finally became aware again of the link between marksman and dragon, and of the emotions puring in through it. The archer had felt them, but he had yet to identify their source as his bonded partner until everything snapped into place. 

  Fear. Desolation. Worry. 

  Shenyu was terrified.

 Instantly, Yi Qiang knew what he needed to do.

   He parted the rampant emotion, from Shenyu, and his own mental state. The instant he regained that balance, which had been perfectly in place until it was thrown into chaos by the teleportation, Yi Qiang realized what he felt. 

  He was calm. Like always. But... this time it was different. There was something else.

  Fear had been, literally and figuratively, beaten out of him. There was no place for it in Yi Qiang's world, a world that placed results over all else. Fear did not get those results.

 As such, little upset his perfect tranquility. Nothing, actually, on Earth could come close. Not pain, nor his own mortality. He was familiar with the worst his planet had to offer, and it no longer contained any aspect of terror for him.

  But he had been so out of his element, so far from the familiar, for so long on Ascend, that the fear he had lost to wherever dead emotions went, began to return.

  But Yi Qiang's ineptitude with self-reflection, and with the balance between self-transcendence and self-immersion required for true inner awareness, had denied that fear's existence.

  For others, it was an emotion completely natural - all the integrated Chosen, without a single exception had experienced it. It was born from their new world, a world so much wider than their previous one. And Yi Qiang, no matter how much he would have loved not to, felt it too - the terror of transitioning to the small, comfortable, familiar vessel that was Earth to the vast and deep bessel of Ascend.

  Suddenly, it all hit him. How he was never going back. How this was his new world. And how different it all was.

   Different emotions than he had planned to send to Shenyu, in hopes of soothing the hatchling, began to surface. Emotions the archer had thought long gone.

  Self-doubt. Anger. Weakness. Fragility.

  Fear.

If Yi Qiang's attention was still on his surroundings, he would see Shenyu begin to tremble as he shared all the wrong emotions.

  But the archer had his hands full wrestling with himself. 

  It had been a long, long time since Yi Qiang had felt the need to do any sort of emotional surveillance. When he was still young, he was plagued by negative emotions, but they served as fuel to temper him. Over time, they died away. 

  What Yi Qiang did not know was that every integrated player had a moment, usually sooner rather than later, where they felt how small they were. Where they felt nothing but fragility, and where this new vessel of Ascend hit them in the face with its size and depth. 

  Universal Technologies had developed techniques to help each player with this inevitable mental overhaul, soothing the player and carefully tweaking certain codes to improve their mental state. With the lockdown, however, that Ascend was currently operating under, they had no such access. 

  So Yi Qiang was on his own.

There was nothing he could do, unfortunately, other than face the emotions in their entirety. He was bombarded by them, his heart shaking. He felt that fragile lightness in his chest that had become so blissfully unfamiliar to him once again, and there was nothing he could do about it.

  He could only be tempered.

In reality, people in the weird realm they were sent into by teleportation circles only lasted there for a very short moment, and fatalities from the symptoms Yi Qiang was constantly suffering from were extremely rare. However, the process of teleportation was, by all of those in important stations that required such a method of near-instant travel, universally regarded as a necessary evil.

  Thankfully, Yi Qiang's mind was trained to work quickly, faster than what should normally be possible, in everything. That included his inner trials, so in the few moments Yi Qiang was in that white void, moments that stretched for years, he was able to regain his composure. 

  The archer hadn't recovered, far from it, but enough time had passed for him to put on his mask once again. This business of his would be saved for another time, the sooner the better, but one where he was safe and away from the prying eyes of others - Yi Qiang was more aware than anyone else of how quickly emotional weakness could place one's safety into jeopardy in political situations like the one he was about to put himself in.

  Shenyu, on the other hand, was complicated business to handle. He was a child, after all, and Yi Qiang could not possibly expect him to put a seal on his feelings. However, the archer's current psychological balance was fragile as well, and the damper he had placed on himself would easily burst should any unforeseen variable arise. 

  Yi Qiang could feel his movement slowing down - he would exit back into the material plane at any moment. He had to focus.

  Shenyu was also drawing closer to him, which was perfect, as the archer did not want to risk the Empyrean dragon hurting himself in the landing. 

  The moment Shenyu finally reached the minimum distance and Yi Qiang pulled him close, cradling the dragon in hi arms, he exited the white void.