"Okay. So... firstly. Mana itself. Raw mana is actually a relatively simple form of exotic matter. A proton and an anti-proton bound together by four reptrons. Atomic mass of six, atomic weight of negative two. Neutrally charged, non-reactive to both matter and anti-matter."
"Secondly, time-crystals. It's possible to take a photon and fold it into higher dimensions as well as temporally to create a repeating pattern in space-time that can function as a sub-atomic 'fuse' that our linker cores can chain onto the mana passing through itself. A linker core can set this fuse with extreme precision, down to the picosecond. This is the fundamental primitive action of casting. You respire mana, prime that mana, and then release it onto our plane, after which the fuse will break the reptron bonds and allow the proton and anti-proton to touch and annihilate into energy. The light produced is polarized by the time-crystals, which constrain it to a particular wavelength within your linker core's chromaprint. Commonly called manalight or mana color."
"The final fundamental action is producing what we call volatile mana. The exact wavelength of light released by annihilating mana is a function of your chromaprint and the exact length of the time-crystal fuse, and with practice one can prime mana in a way that makes the fuse reactive instead of on a timer. It'll be as stable as unprimed mana, until it is hit by a photon corresponding to the annihilation of only one possible length of timed fuse. Follow so far?"