Chapter 760: Taking the Stage

[!! ELIMINATION PERIOD !!]

[This round's elimination will follow Standard 2.]

[Endorsers ranking in the top 50% by Heat Value within the same product category (excluding first place) will lose their eligibility and leave the stage.]

[Endorsers remaining on stage may choose to Unmask.]

This time, no forced confinement to the Reflection Room was triggered, confirming that Yu Xinming genuinely hadn't lied.

But the real trouble was that the elimination standard had flipped this round, meaning higher-Heat-Value endorsers were now the ones being cut.

Four players were bathed in coloured spotlights, meaning they'd successfully advanced to the next round.

Jiang Chenyan and Gao Jialiang were among them without question, being the highest-Heat-Value endorsers for Alcohol and Luxury Goods respectively. But the other two who advanced weren't Yu Xinming or the other Alcohol endorser. Instead, they were the two lowest-Heat-Value Luxury Goods endorsers, each sitting at only around 2,000.

Yu Xinming, of all people, had been eliminated.

Gao Jialiang tore off his mask and flung it into the crowd, and the audience erupted into another wave of enthusiastic applause and screaming. There was no denying it, his looks really were the best among all the male players present, instantly seizing the entire venue's attention. Behind him, his name briefly appeared on the screen: [Community 13, Gao Jialiang].

The other two surviving Luxury Goods endorsers came from Community 18 and Community 22.

The Community 18 player also chose to unmask, but his appearance held no advantage whatsoever compared to everyone else on stage, and it drew essentially no reaction at all.

The Community 22 player seemed to have already sensed this. He chose not to unmask, keeping his mask on, and his name didn't appear on the large screen either. He was clearly leaning on reverse psychology: with every other player on stage having already unmasked, and his own appearance offering no particular advantage, he might as well be the one player on stage who stayed masked. That alone could leave the audience with a certain air of mystery.

Lu Qi couldn't help admiring the move. It really was a valid approach. Among all the endorsers currently on stage, this masked Community 22 player was, if nothing else, the one whose presence drew a second glance from her instinctively. And a second glance meant a little extra Heat Value siphoned his way.

Just as the audience waited for the next round to begin, something unexpected happened.

Yu Xinming chose to remove his mask too.

He seemed unwilling to accept the outcome quietly. Looking at his appearance objectively, he wasn't bad at all, not quite on Gao Jialiang's level, but genuinely comparable to Jiang Chenyan, just different in style and presence.

But his name didn't appear on the large screen. Instead, a red warning message flashed up.

[This Endorser has committed a violation and will be forcibly confined to the Reflection Room until the game ends.]

[Please enter the Reflection Room within 10 minutes, or you will receive the Instant Death Penalty!]

Yu Xinming's face darkened. He hurled his mask to the ground in anger, then quietly stepped off the stage and made his way to the Reflection Room.

A wave of booing rose from the audience, an open display of mockery at what looked like a genuinely poor loser's reaction.

Watching the four remaining endorsers on stage, Lu Qi suddenly felt a rising sense of urgency. Because as of right now, not a single one of them was from Community 2.

"Given how things are going, with a fixed 50% elimination every round, the only really safe strategy is to become the undisputed first place in some category.

"After four rounds, if the number of surviving endorsers on stage stays unchanged for two rounds in a row, the game ends. And if we haven't secured a spot among any endorser's top 10 supporters by then, we'll be docked 30,000 minutes of visa time.

"But it's obviously too late now to try latching onto someone like Jiang Chenyan. Community 15 has surely had players locked onto him and feeding him Heat Value from the very first round, and they'll keep doing so all the way through. Players positioned near him too. Once that kind of head start is established, everyone else is shut out.

"Our best option is for one of our own community's players to become an endorser and hold on to the very end.

"But Qin Cheng is the only one from our community who could do that. When is he planning to take the stage, though? Every endorser only gets one real chance. Once eliminated, there's no second attempt, and that costs 30,000 minutes on top of it."

Lu Qi glanced at the others and noticed Qin Cheng seemed to be weighing the best possible timing to step forward himself.

Just then, new text began appearing across the four screens that had been claimed earliest in the game, all displaying the same five characters in perfect unison.

[Support Jiang Chenyan!]

Clearly, Community 15's Agent had made his move, sending headlines to those first four screens' Media Representatives and seizing the early advantage. It wasn't clear exactly how much visa time it had cost him.

Yao Yuan shifted his position once more, putting some distance now between himself and the rest of Community 2's players, in order to confirm which communities had won the bidding for the newest four screens, while continuing to monitor the areas he'd already flagged as significant, Communities 15, 17, and 18.

Sure enough, of the players who'd won this round's bidding, two were confirmed to be from Community 18, and while the other two couldn't be directly identified by their mask numbers, based on the earlier zone breakdown, they were very likely from Community 18 as well.

What's more, a Community 15 player had made his way over into the Community 17 and 18 area, apparently discussing something with them.

Yao Yuan turned this over thoughtfully. Only Agents were permitted to speak freely on the floor, and an Agent could only exist once a fellow community member had become an endorser. Which meant this had to be Community 15's Agent, simultaneously sending a headline through his forearm display while also attempting to negotiate with Communities 17 and 18.

The length of their discussion suggested something fairly elaborate was being worked out. Yao Yuan tried to piece together what he knew of these communities, working out what role each might be playing in whatever plan was taking shape.

[Round 3 begins!]

[This round's product category is: Community Tobacco Products.]

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

[Any player interested in becoming the Tobacco 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.]

Lu Qi blinked. "Tobacco?"

The category caught her off guard. She hadn't expected this to come up as a category at all, let alone this early. Compared to Alcohol and Luxury Goods, Tobacco felt like a genuinely poor choice. Sure, alcohol carried some carcinogenic risk of its own, but for most players, the harm of occasional drinking was negligible, and it didn't affect anyone else. Tobacco was different. Setting aside the health risks entirely, secondhand smoke alone was enough to make most players uncomfortable. This was the category with the weakest public backing, and it would almost certainly struggle to gather much support.

Winning this category would come down heavily on the endorser's own image, and on how the product itself was framed.

But before Lu Qi could even process this fully, two Community 2 players had already stepped quickly onto the stage.

"Wait, we're going for this category?"

She had no way to ask, but since Qin Cheng had already taken the stage, there had to be some plan behind it.

Lu Qi tried to work out his reasoning: since elimination happened strictly by product category, Qin Cheng wouldn't actually need to compete against Jiang Chenyan or Gao Jialiang at all. He'd only need to outperform whoever else chose Tobacco. If he could pull off a surprise win and take first place within this category, he'd have just as strong a path to surviving to the end and claiming the reward.

As for Lu Qi and the others, all they could do now as audience members was fix their eyes on Qin Cheng immediately and start feeding him Heat Value.