Could loyalty put food on the table? Hogg could tell you for certain: it could!
In this godforsaken world, anything could happen. Life was miserable enough already; without something to nourish the spirit, you might as well just die. But even death offered no peace.
Imperials liked to call planets "worlds" and outer space "the void," but those were just regional differences in dialect. What truly astonished Hogg was how completely their minds had been warped.
Take the serfs on some remote worlds, for instance. They were the perfect example of what it meant to be born human yet spend your entire life as a beast of burden—sometimes living worse than one. And yet, the more wretched the place, the deeper its people's faith in the God-Emperor.
And they weren't the only ones. It wasn't just the worlds plagued by poverty and hardship. Even some Planetary Governors—whose corruption was so extreme that calling it corruption was letting them off lightly—were like this. Never mind whether their actions were even remotely human; their faith in the Emperor was unswerving, so unwavering it was downright terrifying.
At first, Hogg couldn't understand it. He couldn't work out why things were this way. Surely you had to be alive before you could pursue faith—or some kind of spiritual solace. After all, that stuff couldn't put food on the table.
But eventually, Hogg figured it out. He wasn't the one who was wrong. The whole world was!
The whole world was like a shit-filled basin hanging overhead, ready to dump a fresh disaster or calamity on you at any moment. Once enough negative emotions piled up, they would draw the attention of Warp Daemons, or even Chaos Gods.
And when that happened, the beliefs Hogg had once looked down on—had even called foolish—became the only