Chapter 10: Twelve Eliminated Before the Game Began

Li Gang read the game notification several times, front and back, before falling silent, speechless for a long while.

The content of the game notification was not lengthy—just a few short sentences, not difficult to understand, especially since God Himself had already provided an explanation afterwards.

Li Gang touched his chest, recalling that sharp pain he had felt there not long ago. That must have been when the signal transmitter was automatically generated.

“Tracking function,” he suddenly thought, murmuring to himself.

Now more than half an hour had passed since that stab of pain at his heart, which meant the game had begun over thirty minutes ago. Although with ten thousand people scattered across the entire globe, the chance of two people appearing in the same county-level city was exceedingly low, it wasn't impossible.

So, as soon as Li Gang realized this, he wanted to check immediately whether there were others in the city he was in.

Even if two people wound up in the same city, and by some rare coincidence crossed paths within half an hour of the game starting, the odds were minuscule. Still, Li Gang could not rest easy unless he confirmed it right away.

He didn’t want someone sneaking into his home without his knowledge. Worse yet, he might even be hunted down, becoming the first to be eliminated.

It wasn’t so much that Li Gang feared being eliminated from the game—he just didn’t want to be the very first one out. Even if no one else would know or care, he simply felt it would be too humiliating to be the first eliminated. Even if he was just muddling through, he wanted at least a few hundred others to be eliminated before it was his turn.

“Tracking function activated. Please select tracking range.” As he spoke, the interface before his eyes automatically switched, and a voice prompt sounded in his mind.

“Tracking range?” Li Gang wondered.

“Yes, you can lock the tracking range to a specific area. The minimum is one kilometer, and the maximum is the whole globe. You can also automatically lock onto a region, and if anyone enters that area, you will be notified. Or you can individually track a specific person to receive real-time updates.” The intelligent system reminded him in crisp, standard Mandarin.

Li Gang thought to himself that this tracking function was remarkably advanced.

He was not surprised to hear the smart wristband’s voice in his mind. He had already figured out as much not long ago.

To his understanding, the intelligence level of the smart wristband far surpassed current Earth technology by at least several centuries.

Not only could the black wristband transmit sound externally, but it could also communicate with him telepathically, directly in his mind.

This form of mental exchange was far more efficient and secure. Even without speaking, a fleeting thought was enough to communicate with the wristband.

Once Li Gang realized this feature existed, he immediately set telepathic communication as his default mode.

“Set the tracking range to a radius of twenty kilometers.”

The virtual display before his eyes shifted at once, forming a circular map marked with various terrains and buildings. At the center was a conspicuous yellow dot.

Li Gang recognized the location at once—it was his own neighborhood.

He quickly understood: the yellow dot represented himself.

“The tracking function displays the user as a yellow dot by default, enemies as red, strangers as blue, and friends as green. Friends and enemies must be manually marked. Scanning a twenty-kilometer radius centered on the user—no other individuals detected,” the intelligent system explained in his mind.

Li Gang carefully examined the rest of the circular map, ensuring there were no other dots, and finally breathed a sigh of relief.

“Expand the scanning range to two hundred kilometers,” he thought next.

The circular map before him shrank rapidly in scale, signifying a vast expansion of the scanning area. Dozens of blue dots appeared.

Li Gang had estimated this range mentally. Centered on himself, a two-hundred-kilometer radius would roughly cover the area of an entire province in China.

His initial twenty-kilometer scan had covered the area of YC City in HB Province—probably even larger than the actual county.

The province he was in, HB, was one of China’s most populous, with over forty million people.

“Scan complete. There are forty-five strangers within the scanned area.”

“So, about forty-five people in one province? That’s more than I expected. Most are clustered around the provincial capital, which makes sense—population is densest there.” Li Gang observed the concentration of blue dots on the map, quickly identifying the cluster as WH City, the capital of HB Province.

“If one province has around forty or fifty people, and China has thirty-four provinces, then there must be thousands of survivors in China alone. I don’t know what mechanism God used to select the survivors, but given China’s population, having several thousand makes sense,” Li Gang mused.

“Activate global tracking.”

At once, the virtual display before him switched to a miniature globe, slowly rotating, dotted with countless blue lights, most clustered in the world’s major population centers as he remembered.

“Scan complete. There are 9,987 strangers within the scanned area.”

“9,987? Wasn’t it supposed to be ten thousand?” Li Gang was puzzled by the result.

“Li Gang, in the ten days before the game began, twelve people have already died—whether from being unable to endure the loneliness or other reasons,” the smart wristband’s voice, as precise as a radio announcer, sounded in his mind.

Li Gang was at a loss for words. Twelve people had died before the game even started?

At the same time, he noticed that after a while, the announcer’s standard Mandarin voice was just as grating as his own regional dialect had been at first.

He immediately set about changing the voice settings, switching it to a cute, anime-style girl’s voice. After listening to it several times, he finally felt completely satisfied, nodding in delight.