Dwayne asked Andrew Rowe:

Andrew could you elaborate on the location of the different mana types in the body? I believe mental is in the mind, life is in the heart, but not sure of the rest. Also how does the attunement location relate to this?

This answer contains spoilers… (view spoiler)[Without an attunement, most mana in normal human from Kaldwyn's body is "grey mana". This is basically "general" mana that does not have a specific elemental affinity.

Certain areas of the body naturally contain small, trace amounts of non-grey mana. This amount of mana is not sufficient to actually cast spells under normal circumstances; it's all there for the basic functionality of the body. You're correct that it's primarily mental mana for the mind and life mana for the heart, but they do contain more than just those things.

I'm not going to address the specific mana compositions for each part of the body here, both because they aren't covered in the books yet and because the trace amounts of mana aren't enough to actually be useful (in the case of Kaldwyn humans under normal circumstances). I'll explain in more detail below.

When someone gains an attunement, the attunement begins to collect and store mana of specific types that correspond to the attunement. At first, this is two mana types depending on the attunement - for example, it's transference and mental for an Enchanter. The attunement also allows you to convert the mana from other parts of your body into the types corresponding to the attunement. This allows someone with an attunement to use the mana from anywhere in their body to cast spells, but it's dangerous and complex.

The complexity is that every type of mana has a different level of efficiency for being converted into any other mana type, and students need to learn this in order to figure out how much mana they can convert safely and how much they're going to need to power a spell.

Moreover, since each body location doesn't just have one type of mana, you'd have to figure out the overall composition of the area (meaning the proportions of every type of mana in the location) in order to figure out how efficient it would be to convert.

For example, converting water mana into knowledge mana is relatively efficient, but converting water mana into fire mana is very inefficient because they are opposites.

I went into a lot of detail about mana conversion ratios in earlier drafts of the book, but ultimately, that was a rare case where I found that the level of complexity was too much even for my style and that most readers would not find it interesting.

The only really important things to get out of this are as follows:
* The body does naturally have a little bit of non-grey mana in it, but it's not in usable amounts.
* Attunements give you access to two types of mana.
* Attunements allow you to convert mana from other parts of the body into those two mana types, making it usable.
* Attunements replenish your mana at the location of the attunement itself much more quickly, making it more effective to use mana from your attunement location, rather than elsewhere. For this reason, many people use their attunement location almost exclusively.
* Overusing your mana in any part of your body can cause yourself permanent harm.
* Other species work differently, and even humans from other parts of the world might as well. You find out more about this in the second book. (hide spoiler)]

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