The next day, Zulie woke up with a headache that wouldn't go away, due to her inattentiveness she suffered from a backlash and her soul was slightly injured.
Luckily she only got a headache and didn't suffer from any mental deterioration, if not for some luck, in the worse case scenario she could have become a vegetable.
Still, what caused Zulie, a veteran witch to make such a beginner mistake?
What is talent? Some were born with exceptional intelligence, able to analyse concepts from multiple angles and see solutions others couldn't.
Some were born with strong bodies and tough physiques unafraid of illness or cold. Able to travel for days and scale great mountains without rest.
For elemental wizards, talent was demonstrated through their attunement to an element. The greater a person's attunement for one element the easier of a time they would have in mastering that element.
In her past life Zulie had a small level of talent for three elements, fire, wind and earth, to think that she now had a talent for space.
A person's compatibility with an element was measured by the density of elemental particles they could perceive.
In the best case scenario a person with the highest talent would be able to perceive a single element with a high level of density making their elemental vision when meditating shine with a single colour.
In her past life, sixty percent of her elemental vision was taken up by red elemental particles of fire while the other forty percent was taken up by green wind particles and yellow brown earth particles.
Yet this time around another colour of particles showed up, a small patch of silver space particles covered up a measly five percent of her vision.
Clenching her fists, a cold light flashed past Zulie's eyes.
In this world, other than the five basic elements of water, fire, lightning, earth and wind there were also rare and illusive elements like space or light.
Individuals with talents for these elements were always hard to deal with, usually standing at the top of each rank they were in while a talented few could even punch up and fight those a rank higher.
Biting her fingernail, Zulie contemplated, although space path was superior to fire path, Zulie was an expert at fire path knowing countless fire path techniques, Space path on the other hand was rare and illusive, space path resources and techniques were rare and precious, most importantly Zulie had far greater attunement for fire path.
Having to choose between both, the safer choice was obvious, as long as nothing bad happened Zulie was guaranteed to reach rank five and even beyond but if she chose space path, reaching even rank one wasn't guaranteed.
Closing her eyes, Zulie's heart calmed. She made her decision.
'What am I hesitating about, since I have the opportunity to cultivate a powerful element I should take it without hesitation. Abandoning what I'm familiar with for an even more exciting future, this has always been my style, instead of retracing my steps I will walk a completely different path this time.'
As for practicing both fire and space path? Although many low level wizards and wizard apprentices did so, Zulie knew that was akin to shooting one's self in both feet before a marathon.
A week passed and the headache finally went away and Zulie tried meditating once more, already prepared, everything went smoothly as Zulie entered the shimmering world of elemental particles.
Shaping her spiritual power into spiritual threads, they extended and moved passed the earth, wind and fire particles before wrapping around the silver space particles before dragging them back inside her body.
Zulie meditated for an hour before her spiritual power was exhausted and she had to stop and go to sleep.
Three years passed and Zulie was now four years old.
Now that she was older she unfortunately could no longer mooch off of her family for free and had to do chores around the house and the farm.
Her family had lived in this farm for more than than eighty years and three generations had contributed a lifetime of work to cultivate this land.
The land they lived on featured a small sized farm land, two chicken coops and a barn for cows.
Entering the chicken coop, Zulie grabbed the newly layed eggs and put them in a basket, after that she helped her mother milk the cows before slipping away using the excuse of going to play.
Her siblings and parents had other chores to attend to while she, being the youngest had few chores.
Zulie spent her alone time practicing hand signs behind the barn, knowing how to properly weave hand signs was integral to casting spells.
Although casting spells without hand signs was possible, it consumed a great amount of spiritual power and took longer to do.
A wizard that mastered sign weaving could cast a fifty hand sign spell in only a few moments.
In her past life, Zulie had imprinted every sign into her bones until her hands moved in a blur, she planned to do the same for this time around.
After finishing her practice, Zulie took a short break to concentrate her spirit. Next, she would cast her first spell.
Alongside weaving ten hand signs in quick succession, Zulie mobilised the space elemental energy within her body and directed it at both a rusty horse shoe and a rock.
In the blink off an eye both the horse shoe and the rock changed positions without any external movement.
This was the effect of switch, a zero grade spell created by Zulie. Using it she could exchange two spatial coordinates.
It not only worked on objects but could even work on certain living beings.
Using it, with further mastery, Zulie would gain the ability to even exchange her location, allowing her to cast a low range version of teleport that she could use to evade attacks or get past barriers.
Not only that but using it on a living being she could exchange a part of their body with an object allowing her to kill with ease.
Of course she could only do such a thing on living beings without a spiritual field, making this spell almost completely useless against wizard level opponents.
Still, for the next part of her journey, this spell will be immensely useful in the near future.