The transition was not instantaneous as Lucien thought.
He felt it the moment the planet-bound teleportation disc activated.
Space did not vanish... it compressed.
Reality folded inward, layer upon layer, like an endless sheet being pleated and forced through a narrowing frame. Distance did not collapse to zero. Instead, it was reduced to traversal.
They were moving through a corridor carved across spacetime itself.
Stars stretched into pale threads. Colors smeared into meaningless gradients. Time lost its rhythm, dragged along the path defined by the disc.
The destination was too far, astronomically far, for raw teleportation. Crossing such distances instantly would tear anything below Eternal-realm into conceptual debris. So the disc created a stabilized transit channel, a controlled passage where distance was bent rather than erased.
Lucien felt himself being pulled, not by force but by destination priority.
