Searching for the Magic Box

Dago pondered. He had not forgotten what he had come here for.

He slowly took out the golden gear left behind by Melville's Wonder Box after it opened the entrance earlier.

The little golden gear floated before Dago, rotating at an exceedingly slow pace.

This was more than a physical rotation. Within Dago's elemental perception, the gear was radiating faint ripples into its surroundings at a specific frequency.

Those ripples resembled an encrypted signal, attempting to establish a resonance with kindred matter slumbering in these deathly silent ruins.

Undine had told Dago that Melville's Wonder Boxes shared a special connection. One box could be used to find another.

He tried moving through the air, descending closer to the rooftops of the city-state below.

Wind elements formed a thin, streamlined shield around him, reducing air resistance and letting him glide through the steel jungle like a silent ghost.

Meanwhile, he kept his spiritual power focused on the golden gear's rotation speed.

Soon, however, Dago discovered that although the gear did provide some guidance, much like a compass, searching this way was far too inefficient.

Based on the rate of change in the gear's rotation speed, Dago quickly constructed a three-dimensional coordinate model in his mind.

The feedback, however, was disappointing.

The signal attenuated extremely quickly and suffered interference from the magnetic fields of the enormous metal buildings around him.

That interference was like countless bursts of noise drowning out the faint "guiding note."

Perhaps the gear's detection range was simply too small.

Or perhaps Melville's Wonder Boxes were scattered too sparsely throughout the Mechanical Heart.

With such an enormous search area, finding something so rare often demanded a tremendous investment of time—and time was a wizard's most precious resource.

"This is no better than trying to fish a needle out of