There is a game, called Planscape: Torment. A pretty old rpg (role playing game). The story in the game was a about a man who made a deal with a powerful night hag, called Ravel. The night hag used some magic to separate the man and his mortality. With his mortality separated from him, the man could not truly die. He would die only to come back to life.

But the spell was flawed, and the man would forget a little bit each time time he died. Over time, the man's mortality gained sentience and sought to totally destroy the man, hoping to make the man forget about his lost mortality. Coz the man's mortality was afraid that the man would one day want to merge with itself, thereby causing itself to lose its own existence.

The game casts you as the man, who have forgotten himself, and is called nameless one as a result. In the game, you had to find Ravel to understand what is missing from your own life, and thus finally seek your own mortality.

Throughout the game, you'll hear Ravel's riddle, "What can change the nature of a man?". Anyone who tried to answer the riddle, would be destroyed by Ravel. And when you (nameless one), finally found Ravel and had to answer the riddle, it didn't matter what your answer was, Ravel would accept it anyway. For the only answer she wanted, was your answer. Which in a way says that only oneself could change the nature of a man.

And of course, you'll understand why i love the story line of this game so much, if you've been following my blog for the past couple months.

Being an atheist is not without its consequences. For without heaven or hell or soul or some system of recycling, for me to die is arbitrary and final. And of this reason, i'm very afraid of death. But i find no shame in such fear, for i accept death as part of life, not part of some cosmic purpose, or cosmic cycle. How could i die if some part of me lives on? If some part of me remains conscious, then i would never have died. This to me, seems like some form of desperate notion to reject death as final and transform death from dying into a transition.

Benny said to me, that my concept of death is ke(3) bei(1)(pinyin). Frankly, i'm not very sure what he meant since my mandarin is not very good, but it doesn't sound very positive. Believing in an afterlife, does not make you live forever.