Investigator Lana Risk was alarmed. Something necessarily financially treacherous had sprung up. It seemed like a common scam on the surface, a promise of becoming rich by purchasing and selling something without intrinsic value.

All the lines connected to people that had been infected by sickma.

It was an innocent enough idea, a pay to play idle videogame. People liked seeing numbers rise up and joining cost nothing. Ingame idle upgrades to see the numbers rising faster could be purchased with the numbers themselves. People could purchase the numbers from each other for real money through ingame interactions.

Most ingame purchases of faster numbers rising would pay for themselves in a few years, but there was more to the game, the real money sink so to say.

The game would be purely hallucinated as it was a mental sickness that could be transmitted by unknown means. People were exchanging money without getting anything substantial, it was a madness that affected economical health through the sickness of mind.

Even non-players had started purchasing numbers, noting them down in exceedingly expensive ways as to proof their possession of the numbers.

This extended so far, that one could transmit numbers in certain shops to exchange them for goods. The sickness had leaked to the males and to the children as well - it had gone bacterial. Where did all those faster rising numbers come from?

Where did the numbers for the purchase of faster rising numbers go to?

The catastrophic rise of the sea had accelerated visibly by the strange madness, that drove people into giving away their money for seemingly nothing.

Lying about having numbers without possessing credible enough means to proof it would attract many, many of these madwomen and men. They would sniff out whether it was a lie, eerily cooperating on finding the truth. They spent way too much effort on even the smallest transgression - one could only imagine what happened to those liars as they mysteriously vanished in midst of the infected mob. Among the mad, the numbers were simply believed, they had seemingly no capacity or will to lie about them.

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The sickness had been named necessarily financial treachery (NFT), but Lana Risk knew that it was just Mega-Sickma.

Behind the scenes, Bacterium Joshua was taking up loans of numbers, which were percieved as 'number gain upgrades'. Due to the high return of investment time, the number drain, which significantly outpaced his own natural number gain, did not plunge him into being poor. In fact due to the high demand for 'upgrades', he was exceedingly rich in a very short time - people would always buy these upgrades, they would even pay others to gain their numbers in order to purchase upgrades. The numbers given back to the people would then again flow back to him as they purchased more 'upgrades'. It was the perfect deal of permanent debt - it was THE necessary financial treachery, and it paid well.

In theory he could do this ad infinitum by adjusting the return on investment values so that he could pay back later, when people had bought more 'upgrades' from which to pay back the people. What if he could not pay back?

Bacterium Joshua simply did not care- he declared it impossible that he would ever run out of numbers to pay back as long people were buying upgrades.

The entire gamble would probably not work unless the sickness spread, which it would do.

After that, it would depend all on the birth rates.

After that, it would depend all on the speed with which one could raze the planet for food.

After that, it would depend... well it would ultimately fail.

But Bacterium Joshua simply did not care.