From a certain day onward, Kraft gradually realized that his premonitions were growing ever clearer.
More precisely, they could scarcely be called premonitions anymore.
A premonition ought to be vague—an irregular product formed when unnoticed details were digested and blended by the subconscious.
Or perhaps it was some mysterious force offering a warning in the unseen, kindling faint ripples in the mind through the barrier between reality and the skull.
People could occasionally glimpse a few threads of the future through it and make preparations they deemed prudent. More often, though, all they could do was wait and worry in vain, bustling about for nothing, sometimes even achieving the opposite of what they intended.
His "premonitions" were not like that.
Nor were they like the divine revelations described in scripture, forced into his mind through abrupt visions or spoken messages that clearly instructed him to do something.
They took a form even harder for ordinary people to comprehend.
It was like the boundaries of his consciousness had loosened. The world no longer passed through his eyes, ears, mouth, nose, and skin, turning external stimuli into inner understanding step by step in a fixed order.
Instead, it began pouring into his consciousness in a cruder, more direct way. Light was no longer a photoelectric conversion on the retina, and sound was no longer the bending of hairs within the cochlea.
Skipping physiological processing and translation, something raw and pure seeped into his mind first, like cold air testing its way through the crack of a door that had not been fully shut.
The sensation was not intense. Most of the time, it could not even be called fleeting.
Only occasionally did he feel that information arrived faster than sound, that his field of vision was broader than what he saw, as