  We study the changes in the short-distance quark structure of the
Nambu-Goldstone boson when the long-distance symmetry-breaking scales are
depleted controllably. We achieve this by studying the valence Parton
Distribution Function (PDF) of pion in 2+1 dimensional two-color QCD, with the
number $N$ of massless quarks as the tunable parameter that slides the theory
from being strongly broken for $N=0$ to the conformal window for $N>4$, where
the theory is gapped by the fixed finite volume. We perform our study
non-perturbatively using lattice simulations with $N=0,2,4,8$ flavors of nearly
massless two-component Wilson-Dirac sea quarks and employ the leading-twist
formalism (LaMET/SDF) to compute the PDF of pion at a fixed valence mass. We
find that the relative variations in the first few PDF moments are only mild
compared to the changes in decay constant, but the shape of the reconstructed
$x$-dependent PDF itself dramatically changes from being broad in the
scale-broken sector to being sharply peaked in the near-conformal region, best
reflected in PDF shape observables such as the cumulants.
