Chapter 758: Elimination

After the Community 28 player entered the Reflection Room, only four endorsers remained on stage.

The two with lower Heat Value were lit by red spotlights, their forearm displays showing red warning messages as well.

The other two, including the Community 15 player, were bathed in coloured spotlights, and the audience erupted into cheers once again.

The two eliminated endorsers stepped down looking rather deflated. For them, this was a genuine loss. They had each already paid 30,000 minutes of visa time to become an endorser, only to earn less than 5,000 in return. And after this, they couldn't become an endorser again.

Becoming an endorser carried real risk. Only those who found a way to survive to the very end without being eliminated could earn a real surplus.

Just as the two eliminated players left the stage, another wave of applause and cheering broke out, louder than anything before it.

Everyone looked toward the stage and saw that the Community 15 player had already removed his mask, his flowing hair drifting in the air, his sharp, striking features now displayed clearly on the large screen.

More than that, the screen also revealed his name.

[Community 15, Jiang Chenyan]

In a venue where every player wore a mask and identical clothing, unmasking instantly made him the centre of attention.

The other surviving endorser had no such luck. His appearance was entirely ordinary, and no one paid him any particular attention at all.

Then, a new message appeared on the screens.

[Bidding for all four large screens has concluded. Players who won the bid for Media Representative should proceed immediately to the Media Room behind their respective screen.]

[Starting now, Agents may purchase headlines on these four screens.]

[Round 2 begins!]

[This round's product category is: Community Luxury Goods.]

[If this product's endorser survives to the final round without elimination and achieves the highest Heat Value among all endorsers, "luxury goods in the community will receive a Special Bonus."]

[Any player interested in becoming the Luxury Goods Endorser: please take the stage within 5 minutes.]

[The four flashing large screens will now enter Bidding status. Please use the touchscreen on your forearm to bid. The highest bidder will become that screen's Media Representative.]

More audience members steadily made their way onto the stage.

Lu Qi couldn't help but marvel to herself. "Everyone's so eager to jump in.

"Though, honestly, Jiang Chenyan's earnings really are impressive."

Under the rules, becoming an endorser required an upfront deduction of 30,000 minutes, and Jiang Chenyan had already earned back 17,000 in the first round alone. As long as he kept avoiding elimination in the rounds ahead, he'd keep earning more still. Even accounting for his heat being split as more endorsers appeared, he'd likely still earn at least another ten thousand or so before the game ended, and all of it would add up to a genuinely staggering total.

More importantly, Jiang Chenyan's most devoted supporters were surely fellow Community 15 players, who had kept their eyes locked on him and fed him Heat Value from round one onward. By the time the game ended, they'd almost certainly rank among his top ten contributors, earning another 30,000 minutes each on top of that.

And as members of "the community whose endorser survived to the end," they'd also share in the visa time redistributed from communities without a surviving endorser.

Add it all up, and Community 15 stood to walk away from this game with an enormous windfall in visa time, the kind other communities couldn't help but envy.

Lu Qi checked the display on her arm again. The final bidding prices for the previous four screens had each landed around 20,000 minutes of visa time.

Four audience members walked toward these screens and entered the Media Room behind them through a special entrance, which meant they could no longer return to the main floor for the rest of the game. From that point on, they could only receive headlines sent by Agents or communicate with other Media Representatives.

"Is that price high or low?"

Lu Qi honestly couldn't tell. Her instinct was that it seemed like a poor deal, since on the surface, these screens didn't appear to serve much practical purpose. Each round, every screen could only display a single line of text no longer than 10 characters. This wasn't a Judgment-type or Elimination-type game, so there was no special in-game advice to convey, and any headline posted would be visible to every audience member anyway.

The only use Lu Qi could think of was displaying your own endorser's name and slogan to help drum up more Heat Value. But would that actually work? Would audience members genuinely feel moved to support a total stranger from another community just because of a headline on a screen?

If not, or if only a handful did, then buying a headline would be a pure loss.

On top of that, a Media Representative couldn't post whatever they wanted, only choose from whatever headlines Agents sent them. If it was an Agent from their own community, that essentially meant paying themselves with no additional benefit. If it was an Agent from another community, they could earn some fee income, sure, but it would inevitably be promoting a rival endorser, and the fee received might not even cover the cost of the original bid.

So Lu Qi's own mental ceiling for the screens sat somewhere under 10,000. Anything above that felt like a poor deal to her.

Of course, she could sense there was probably some deeper mechanism she wasn't seeing, and that the players willing to spend over 20,000 on a screen surely had their own strategy in mind. She just couldn't quite work out what it was yet.

She didn't dwell on it too much, though, since Qin Cheng and Yao Yuan were leading this game. If the screens really mattered that much, they'd surely have made a move to bid on one themselves.

Meanwhile, Yao Yuan had positioned himself in the most open part of the venue, watching the floor carefully.

This game had no obvious segregation between communities. Everyone was packed together, dressed identically, making accurate identification genuinely difficult. The only clue was the number on each mask.

But since the endorsers had taken the stage from various different positions, the audience members were oriented in all directions, and many players' mask numbers faced away from him.

Yao Yuan could only rely on memory to track the movement of players from different communities within the dense crowd.

After Round 1 ended, he adjusted his position slightly to get a clear side view of the players heading toward the screens.

"The three I can see right now are all from Community 17. Can't make out the fourth one's mask."

He looked toward the area where Community 17's players had gathered, which sat adjacent to both Community 15 and Community 18.

He glanced around at other sections out of the corner of his eye, but ultimately decided to focus his attention here.

The endorsers for Round 2 had also taken the stage, five of them again, bringing the total number of endorsers now on stage to 7.

Lu Qi had expected far fewer to step up this round, maybe two or three, since Luxury Goods didn't seem to carry the same obvious appeal as Alcohol. Most communities organised group meals for team bonding, and drinking during those was practically unavoidable. Champagne carried an obvious symbolic association with victory.

Luxury goods, though? Few communities were likely to organise bulk purchases of luxury items. Its importance couldn't really compare to alcohol.

"Maybe it's because, under the rules, endorsers are eliminated by product category?"

Since players couldn't speak or communicate in this game, and Qin Cheng and Yao Yuan hadn't assigned her any particular task, Lu Qi had extra time to work through the mechanics herself.

She frowned in thought. "Because elimination happens by product category, suppose Product A has 4 endorsers and Product B has 6, and all of Product A's endorsers have higher Heat Value than Product B's.

"If eliminating the bottom 50% were based on total Heat Value across everyone, it would only eliminate from Product B's five.

"But the rules say elimination is by product category, which means Product A loses 2 and Product B loses 3.

"And on top of that, the rules also say the first-place endorser in each category is never eliminated.

"So endorsing different products is essentially like competing in separate lanes entirely. As long as you can take first place within your own lane, it's still worthwhile.

"And these players must genuinely believe Luxury Goods is a strong lane to be in."