Setting a variable to the next instance in the list does not work

Context: I am coding Dijkstra's shortest path algorithm to practice the basic patterns I read in the tutorials on excel-vba...

I am facing a problem. After a lot of debugging, I found the problem.

Here is a mini version that shows the problem (commented):

Option Explicit

Private Sub btnSolution_Click()
    Dim N As Integer: N = 3

    'Creating one list with the first cell as head
    Dim list As New model_linked_list
    Set list.next_cell = Nothing

    'Creates list 1..N
    Dim i As Integer: i = N
    Do While i > 0
        'Creates the next cell adding to the start (after the head-cell)
        Dim cell As New model_linked_list
        cell.city = i
        Set cell.next_cell = list.next_cell

        'Update head-cell
        Set list.next_cell = cell
        i = i - 1
    Loop

    'All good till here, but when I try to loop over the list:

    Dim item As model_linked_list
    Set item = list.next_cell

    'You will to set a breakpoint in this line to avoid infinite loop
    Do While Not item Is Nothing

        MsgBox item.city 'Always shows "1"

        'This is the problematic line
        Set item = item.next_cell 'It seems like it does nothing, literally
    Loop

End Sub

      

        
        
        
      

    

My is model_linked_list

simple:

Option Explicit

Public city As Integer
Public next_cell As model_linked_list

      

        
        
        
      

    

To illustrate, the above code should simply create one list like this:

It Set

just doesn't seem to work when I try to navigate to the next cell in the list. Has anyone seen this before? How do I get around this?

Thanks in advance.