Mana, in its pure form, is an imperceivable, incomprehensible, ever-changing force that forms the Astral quasi-plane. It is alien and fatally detrimental, as it aggressively restructures the very natural order of any reality to make it fit its own reality. Any unprotected materia that comes into contact with pure mana, immediately becomes a subject to its influence, which manifests in a form of unpredictable mutations, followed by what we perceive as material deterioration and, finally, obliteration. However the final process is much more finesse than what catches the eye, as the Astral doesn't merely destroy what is not it, but reshapes it into pure mana form.

And at the same time, we know mana as a substance, that comes in different states, colours, smells and tastes. But how is it possible? It's hypothesised, that our world's natural Foreign Body Response is what reshapes, or rather, gives a comprehensible shape to the Astral force -- corpuscles and waves. Before the Great Cataclysm, it was the mystical fire of the sky-pores that punctured the world's tissue, and now, it's the work of the meteoric shielding.

The mana, as most of us know it, is actually called a distilled mana and it falls slowly onto our world in a form of corpuscles or permeate through it in form of laminar astral flows -- ansibles. And though it's still highly hazardous, it has a perceivable and manipulable form.

Being constantly irradiated by the smallest amounts of mana, various species across the world slowly mutated abilities to manipulate it with different body processes, which later developed into the ability to primitively exploit the ambient mana outside their organisms. It is also speculated, the mana was the main evolution catalyst of all material in our world.

In the early days of arcana, shaping the mana into magic was more of a science, a complex fusion of mathematics, anatomy and cognitive practices. Learning from our nature, we found our ways to extract, redistill and reshape the mana into liquid, solid and even gaseous states. We've been refining this process over decades of centuries, making mana less toxic, more affordable and more understandable for our bodies to wield it, up until the moment, when we invented the technologies to eliminate the necessity in the organism- and thought-medium at all.