[Year xxxx of training.]

“Omni what are you watching there?”

“I am analysing the positions of the planets to see when the next Advent will take place.”

“Advent?”

“The alignment of the planets. It occurs in a cycle, and if my calculations are correct the next one will occur about 200 years.”

“That will not affect this place right?”

“Yes, I am positive that the next Advent will not affect this place. Though I am curious what will happen out there. The last one gradually deprived the world of mana, I wonder if the effect will be the same this time around.”

“How are you seeing the outside anyway?” I asked her as I watched the night sky being displayed on the screen.

“By using the earth and metal golem, just like the one you are using as a practice dummy just a bit modified to transmit the visual and audio signal back to this place.”

I stopped swinging my sword and stared at Omni, she paid me no mind and continued clicking away at a piece of metal that she called a “keyboard”. We were supposed to be trapped in here with no way out then how did that golem get out there?

“Where did you get that golem anyway?”

“These were stored in another storage location about 2000 miles north of here. The connection to that place had not been damaged, so I am able to communicate with it. Before you ask no it cannot be used to stop the training program, because it cannot perform any complex tasks. We could have used it if the main control board was operational, but since it has been broken we need to enter a long list of commands manually to stop it safely. The golems I currently have access to and can make are like brutes more suited to smash things, than gently input commands in a delicate piece of machinery.”

I went back to practicing the sword after hearing her explanation. I had been practicing it for a decade now and just reached the journeyman level a few days ago. Sometimes I lament my mediocre talent. I had guessed that I would breeze through mastery levels and prove the machine wrong, completing my training faster than 5000 years but at times it seems it will take a lot longer to complete my training.

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[210 years later]

I had been practicing thrusting with the spear when the room shook as if it had been hit by an earthquake. Maintaining my balance I looked around trying to see the cause of the shaking. I found nothing unusual. The room looked as it always had been bland and white.

Finding nothing amiss I turned to Omni whose undivided attention was locked on the screen. I blinked behind her trying to see what had her captivated.

The screen in front of me showed the same starry night sky I had become accustomed to seeing for the past 200 or so years. I looked at it trying to see if anything was different, I saw nothing out of the ordinary.

“What’s happening?”

“Advent is starting. You cannot tell but the planets will all align at midnight.”

Omni highlighted five dots on one screen and another two on a screen besides the main, they were indistinguishable from the stars around them and I would not have been able to separate each other.

Omni pressed a series of keys and a third display came to life, it showed the sun with a straight line coming from it. The planets were almost all on the line, as I watched the first planet come into place, the second one followed a few seconds later and then Creru( my home world ) stopped in its place. The other planets soon followed and at midnight the last planet came to a stop in its place.

When the planets aligned, the third display showed a wave that originated from the sun traveling outwards from it. As it passed the planets black dots appeared around them. When it passed Creru, Omni changed the main display showing the black dots around our planet.

The dots started to spin and grow in size gradually.

“The mana in the atmosphere is being absorbed now. The process should gradually increase in intensity as the days pass, the record shows that the last one lasted for 1 year before stopping and disappearing.”

I watched as it expanded, the small dots now looked like small mouths hungrily sucking up the mana around them.

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The full effect of the Advent was not felt for a month. In that time the dots had transformed into large 50 foot diameter holes in the sky. Sucking up mana around it but leaving everything else alone.

After a month the first monsters started to die where they stood. Their bodies not being able to sustain in the mana less environment. The small monsters like the horned rabbit started to die first, medium sized monsters lasted another month but gradually they also started to die. Large scale monsters like dragons and elementals lasted for 5 months but they too followed their brethren. Seeing these majestic creatures die was a humbling experience to say the least.

Humans were the least affected among the sapient species that inhabited Creru. Humans by default have a small amount of mana in our bodies and what we had was locked away until we received a blessing related to magic or if we trained the warrior path. The beastmen were in a similar condition, they also did not have a large mana capacity relying on their brute strength and savagery to survive.

The hardest hit were the Elves, Demons and the Dwarves. The dwarves were crushed under their mountain homes. The spells that kept the roofs above their vast cavern cities all failed at once when the mana ran out, the resulting collapse caused a great deal of damage to the surrounding area. Whole mountain ranges were destroyed in some places. Almost all of the species were wiped out in one night, few who were out adventuring were the only ones that survived.

The elves and the demons with their high mana capacities died slowly. These two races were capable of sustaining a long life by enhancing their organs with the help of mana, some humans had also learned this trick but were not as successful as them. The elders and elites amongst them suffered the most. As mana disappeared from the environment, their own mana was running dry, their natural regeneration not able to keep up with the rate at which the mana was being drained, they began to age rapidly.

Their lives that had been augmented by the use of mana were running out, they aged years at a time as the mana disappeared. Only the young ones that were less than 100 years of age survived but they too were crippled, their society that thrived in the use of magic was in ruins.

I saw this all as I sat in the training room.

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“How long will the golems last out there?”

“As per the current output and the consumption it will last about a month or so, if it is not damaged by anything.”

The Advent had occurred eight month ago and the vortex did not show any signs of stopping. They just sat there like giant holes in the sky absorbing any mana that was produced, but leaving everything else untouched.

The change brought by Advent was horrible to watch. It killed the leaders of all the races, Kings and Queens that had prided themselves for having large mana stores lay dead in their castles.

In the human region the radical priests that supported human superiority called the event as a punishment from god for not cleaning the filth that were demi-human from the world.

This notion gained more and more momentum as the months passed and the relation between the various groups was beginning to decay.Violence seemed to be shimmering just beneath the surface of every town and village.

Then the crops started to fail. Wheat and corn grew all shriveled and weak. Potatoes that should have been abundant during this time of year did not germinate at all. The farm animals with a lack of feed started dying. Famine had gripped a large portion of the land.

The last thing that I saw with the golem were the armies of the surviving humans banding together under the banner of the radical priests marching together towards the elves.

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[3 years after the Advent]

“Hey Omni what’s the situation like out there?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why? Are you not monitoring it using the golem like last time?”

“I tried to open a portal to the outside but the portal is not forming at all. I can get the two portal gates to link but as soon as I start to supply mana to the gate the mana just disappears, the gates are intact as I can see the initial connection form but the mana that I supply to it just keeps being sucked by something.” Omni seemed to be irritated at the thought.

“What do you think is the cause of it?” I was a bit concerned. If Omni could not form the portal I would be trapped in here even if I finished my training.

“I can think of few things that may be the cause;

The mana in the environment out there is too thin, resulting in the mana I supplied to be absorbed by the surrounding to normalise it. If such I can try again in a few years. There is an artifact / creature / being out there that is actively absorbing the mana for their own use. The effect of Advent is still active.”

Listening to Omni I panicked a little. If the effect of the Advent did not pass I would be stuck here forever.

“Hey did you not say that the effect would last for 1 year at most?”

“That is what I formulated by reading the data available to me. It did not state that in full. The sage that recorded the data said that the black vortex had disappeared 1 year after Advent. The sage was dying at the time and did not record if the effect was decreasing or not. So I cannot tell conclusively how long its effect will last.”

The panic was beginning to increase and was about to turn into full blown terror as I listened to her. I began to mutter and curse the gods. Why was this happening now? Advent was supposed to be a small bump in my current situation, with it having no direct effect on me. But now it seemed that I would be trapped here for all eternity or until I decided to give up.

I felt a painful slap on my cheeks as I was going around in my head. Omni stood in front of me, hands on her hip, and a look of disgust on her face.

“Stop your pity party and start your training. We have 3500 years to figure out something, who knows maybe the mana will have returned by that time, if not we could use the knowledge in the data stores to find another planet with mana to like in.”

“Another planet?” I asked, confused. I had heard of this before but it was hard to believe that it would be easy to find one. Many scholars had tried to create portals to another planet but all of them had failed, the mana consumption was huge and you needed precise coordinates while opening a new portal to the unknown.

“Yes the empire’s record shows that they were able to find a planet similar to ours. They opened portals to them but it was deemed a failure when the exploration team that was sent through never returned. Over a 10,000 lives were lost by the time the project was abandoned.

So stop moping around and get training, even if we cannot open this portal we will find another way to get out of here.”