Inside the Magic Cube Maze, pale blue spherical circles spread across a simple terrain map generated by Heavenly Pivot's calculations from scans taken through the Puppets' Eye Crystals.
Each had a radius of around a hundred li, with its center lying along the edge of another great circle several thousand li across.
Li Chen was deploying Detection Mechanism Devices along a route by dropping them from the air.
More than six hundred detectors linked together over a distance of sixty thousand li could mark out a vast circle encompassing ten thousand li.
But considering his own flight speed, he had not marked out such an enormous area in one go. Instead, around the three-thousand-li radius where the reports suggested his quarry was most likely to be, he used a specially made Flying Shuttle to follow a predetermined route and automatically drop the devices without anyone piloting it.
This Flying Shuttle was designed specifically to transport small Mechanism Devices. It could reach five thousand li per two-hour period, or more than a thousand kilometers an hour.
Circling an area with a radius of three thousand li meant a flight of roughly nineteen thousand li, which would take less than eight hours.
During the process, the communication functions built into the detectors it dropped could help overcome interference from the earth's spiritual essence and ensure that it remained on the correct flight path.
It was not impossible for the Flying Shuttle to be lost midway, or for the Detection Mechanism Devices it dropped to be accidentally swallowed by living creatures or damaged.
But those possibilities were so remote that they could almost be ignored.
If something like that did happen, a signal would inevitably be sent back. He could then summon the Large Communication Array from inside the Magic Cube Maze-a Mobile