Afterward, Inquisitor Thraxol took a Shuttle to the Death Lord and inspected the personnel and equipment aboard.
After spending some time there, he went to take a look at the two smaller Armed Merchant Ships as well.
Overall, of the three warships, the Death Lord had the strongest combat capability. The other two Armed Merchant Ships were the weakest and basically only had transport capacity.
Then there was the matter of Chaos corruption. Personnel on all three Armed Merchant Ships showed signs of it. Even the pirate ship Swift Shadow had seized bore considerable traces of corruption.
Warp corruption was like nuclear radiation. Being exposed to it did not mean certain death; only when the concentration of corruption reached a very high level would mutations appear on the corrupted person's body.
In the current environment, most Imperium citizens carried Warp corruption in their bodies, though only in very low concentrations.
One role of the Imperial Cult Cathedral was to keep Warp corruption under control to a certain extent.
Pirates lived meal to meal, and it was simply impossible for their ships to have anything like a Shipboard Cathedral.
Corruption was even more serious among pirates. Some pirates even actively worshipped Chaos.
However, anyone who ended up becoming a pirate was generally useless. The Chaos Gods could not be bothered to cast their gaze upon them, so the concentration of Warp energy in their bodies was not high. They had not developed protruding bone spurs, severe deformities, or similar problems. Most merely looked pale.
Based on what he had discovered, Inquisitor Thraxol divided his subordinates into three categories.
The first consisted of ordinary people without obvious mutations. The second consisted of ordinary people with obvious mutations but no desire to die. The third consisted of people so severely mutated that they