The Island Crisis game had entered its final countdown, and the Organizing Committee had introduced a few new tricks to make the battles between players even more intense.
This made the show more entertaining while also speeding up the progress of the game.
The game, which was expected to end in two months, had reached its final stage. If the remaining players were not forced into direct confrontations, they might hide on the island for the rest of their lives without ever showing themselves.
Unless only two people remained!
This also made the Organizing Committee realize that a killing game like this needed a mechanism to constantly "herd" the players into a smaller area. Otherwise, they could find a corner and hide there for the rest of their lives!
The Organizing Committee naturally had no idea what "the shrinking circle" was, but they had methods of their own.
They simply announced the location of the Evacuation Point.
At the same time, they gave the players a final time limit—twenty-four hours.
When the twenty-four-hour countdown officially began, betting money from around the world started rising rapidly. Almost every second, betting calls came into the various betting shops.
Funds were also moving through the banks at an astonishing rate, with tens of thousands of units of currency flowing into the company's accounts every second.
The Organizing Committee estimated that before the final winner appeared, the total bets would not be less than one billion. The overall amount wagered since the start of the competition would not be less than seventeen and a half billion.
At least nine billion of those funds would become the company's profits and enter its accounts.
Of course, "prediction betting" was not considered "gambling" by the Federal Government, so it was subject to only a forty-percent business tax.