Mana Conduits are the veins of any mana-powered building, the hidden infrastructure that makes the difference between a Generator sitting in a basement producing energy that goes nowhere and an entire structure lit, heated, and mechanically alive from a single power source. They are not visible in any finished building. They run inside walls, beneath floors, and above ceilings, emerging only at the connection points where Infrastructure Items draw from them — the lamp housing set into the wall, the heating element mounted in the floor, the mechanical socket that powers a lift or a workshop tool. Everything else is concealed, and deliberately so. A building whose conduit network is exposed is a building whose construction is unfinished.

The physical form of a Mana Conduit is a tube: typically between two and five centimetres in diameter depending on the load it is designed to carry, constructed from a ceramic outer shell threaded internally with copper alloy filaments that do the actual work of conducting mana energy. The ceramic provides structural integrity and mana insulation — preventing the energy inside from bleeding outward into the surrounding material of the wall or floor. The copper threading provides the conductive path, its specific alloy composition developed and standardised by the Mana Guild to balance conductivity against heat generation over long runs. Both materials are produced to Guild specification and carry Guild certification marks at regular intervals along their length, pressed into the ceramic during manufacture.

The conduit network in any building is not a single unbroken pipe running from Generator to every connection point. It is a branching system: a main trunk line running from the Generator to a central distribution point, from which secondary lines branch out toward different areas of the building, from which tertiary lines branch again toward individual connection points. The branching is managed by Junction Housings — small metal and ceramic assemblies installed at each branching point that regulate how much mana flows down each branch and prevent a surge in one part of the network from affecting the rest. Junction Housings also function as the primary maintenance access points. A technician diagnosing a conduit problem moves through the building's Junction Housings methodically, isolating sections of the network until they find where the fault sits.

The connection points where Infrastructure Items meet the conduit network are standardised across the entire Mana Guild system. A lamp housing from any Guild-certified manufacturer fits any Guild-standard conduit connection point without modification. This is the standardisation that the Mana Guild enforced at the beginning of the Mana Revolution and has maintained ever since, and it is one of the primary reasons that maintaining and upgrading a building's mana infrastructure is straightforward rather than a custom engineering project every time something needs to change.

Conduits fail in predictable ways. The ceramic outer shell can crack under structural movement — buildings settle, temperature cycles expand and contract materials, and a conduit run across a structural joint without proper flexible coupling will eventually crack at that point. When ceramic cracks, the insulation fails, and mana bleeds into the surrounding material. In stone or brick this produces a faint warmth and a residual mana glow that experienced technicians can identify by touch and sight. In timber it can produce heat buildup that, left unaddressed, becomes a fire risk. The copper threading can corrode in high-moisture environments or develop resistance buildup over long periods that reduces the flow rate without stopping it entirely, producing the characteristic slow dimming and reduced performance that signals an ageing network in need of replacement.

Replacement is expensive, disruptive, and unavoidable in buildings old enough that the original installation has reached the end of its reliable service life. The Mana Guild maintains records of every certified conduit installation in Versa, including installation dates and the certification status of the technicians who performed the work. When a building's network approaches the age at which failures become common, the Guild sends a maintenance advisory. Whether the building's owner acts on it promptly or waits until something actually fails is, in the Guild's experience, almost entirely a function of how recently they last dealt with an emergency repair and how much that cost them.