From Houston to San Antonio, the bus jolted through the Texas night for several hours.
Garnett was quiet the entire way. For the first time, the chatterbox who usually never stopped talking kept his mouth firmly shut, clutching a basketball to his chest. His mind was full of The Dream's low-post footwork as he chewed over that sense of helplessness.
But Lin Qi, sitting in the very back row, had even more complicated feelings than Garnett.
Because their next stop was the Alamodome.
It was the home of the San Antonio Spurs, whose franchise star was The Admiral-David Robinson.
Leaning against the window, Lin Qi watched the Texas wilderness race backward outside, weighed down by a secret he could tell no one.
Half a year earlier, in this very team's general manager's office, he had used a package of seemingly equivalent assets to pry that 1997 first-round pick out of Gregg Popovich's hands-top-three protected.
Popovich had even thought the people in Boston were crazy. In the eyes of that wine-drinking, cerebral coach, it was nothing but a worthless pick somewhere in the twenties. With Sean Elliott having overcome the effects of kidney disease and David Robinson in his prime, San Antonio would be an elite Western Conference powerhouse for the next five years.
But Lin Qi knew of a tragedy Popovich could never have imagined.
Next season, the 1996-97 season, David Robinson would suffer a devastating back injury and a fracture, wiping out his season and limiting him to just six games. Without their anchor, the Spurs would collapse overnight, finishing with a franchise-worst record of 20-62.
Then, on the strength of that record, they would win the first overall pick in next summer's draft lottery and bring home a rookie named Tim Duncan, who would become the cornerstone of their franchise for the next twenty years.
And that top-three-protected 1997 pick in Lin Qi's hands...
What if a slight flutter of his butterfly wings caused the Spurs to slip in the lottery?
Once it fell outside the top three, that pick would cross the red line and go straight to Boston.
Lin Qi leaned back in his seat, tapping his fingertips lightly against the armrest. For the Celtics, whose stockpile of assets was growing ever richer, a slight adjustment to history would merely be a bonus measured in draft positions. But for the San Antonio of the future, if their luck plunged into the abyss, it would mean not only missing out on Tim Duncan, but having even that fourth pick, their last scrap of dignity, swallowed whole, skin and bones, by the vultures far away in Boston.
It would be a catastrophe enough to leave this long-established Texas powerhouse lying in the ruins for another ten years.
Tonight, Lin Qi would watch that healthy, powerful David Robinson, at the very peak of his interior dominance, race across the court with his own eyes.
A man whose bones, Lin Qi knew full well, would be broken by fate in another year, sending him plunging into the abyss.
That disparity of information-"I know your future, while you have no idea"-had meant companionship and development filled with mutual understanding when it came to Garnett. With Robinson, however, it became a cold, unspeakable sense of fate.
Lin Qi could not warn Robinson. Before this storm that was destined to arrive, he was merely an outsider. He would not play savior, but neither could he celebrate the disaster awaiting a great player entirely like a cold-blooded businessman. All he could do was sit there and watch, fully aware, as history moved step by step toward that predetermined turning point.
In business, the most helpless thing was often not encountering a bad person, but knowing full well that a good person was about to fall into the abyss while reason told you that you had to remain in the shadows, waiting to harvest the profits born of that disaster.
Lin Qi leaned back and closed his eyes.
Only the dull roar of the engine remained inside the bus.
After an unknown stretch of time, the bus finally slowed, its tires rolling over San Antonio's dry streets before the brakes gave a dull groan.
Lin Qi opened his eyes. Outside the window, the Alamodome, crouched in the Texas night like a steel behemoth, was already right before him.
Several hours later.
At the Alamodome, the paint was boiling.
When David Robinson first lowered his center of gravity to establish position under the basket, Garnett, standing behind him, could not help clenching his teeth hard.
Unlike Olajuwon in Houston, who looked lean and exuded Nigerian sorcery and mystical footwork, the Robinson before him delivered a visual shock to the nineteen-year-old that belonged to an entirely different dimension.
Standing 2.16 meters tall, with muscles like a Greek sculpture forged through punishing discipline on a naval base, he stood straight as a javelin ready to pierce the rim at any moment. He needed no shouting as he stood in the paint; that distinctively military discipline and oppressive presence bore down solidly all on their own.
What made Garnett feel even more uncomfortable was Robinson's manner.
The Dream was devout and gentle, while Robinson possessed an almost "white-collar aristocratic" dignity and refinement. He was unfailingly polite to the referees, and even after knocking a Celtics fringe player down on defense, he would instinctively bend over and offer a hand to help him up.
Here was a bona fide naval officer, an academic standout who had majored in mathematics in college, a man with the word "gentleman" etched into the crevices of his bones.
Garnett's loud, blustering street manner, honed on Chicago South Side, looked utterly out of place in this arena.
As soon as the game began, Garnett pressed up against him, trying to find his rhythm through physical contact and trash talk.
"Hey, Admiral! Heard you spent time on deck? Better keep your footing tonight, then. I'm faster than a torpedo-"
Robinson merely gave him a polite, even slightly puzzled glance.
He did not spare Garnett so much as a "shut up." He turned, dipped his shoulder, executed a textbook face-up jab step without the slightest hitch, then released an exquisitely soft midrange jumper.
Swish. Two points.
Garnett swallowed his trash talk right back down.
He realized that although The Dream's trash talk was sophisticated, at least it was still a "conversation." But Robinson, this gentleman, had simply erected an insulating wall in his mind. The Admiral's eyes saw only the lines on the tactical board; those extraneous little street-thug antics could not leave so much as a mark on him.
The lesson Robinson gave this nineteen-year-old rookie was entirely different from Malone's or The Dream's.
It was The Admiral's own brand of "versatility."
True, The Admiral's strength could occasionally seem insufficiently overpowering against monsters like O'Neal or Malone. But for Garnett, who had yet to get even his core strength training down and was as skinny as a bamboo pole, Robinson's naval physique, maintained at 110 kilograms year after year without an ounce of excess fat, was still an impenetrable iron wall when defending the low post. Colliding with him left Garnett short of breath.
In strength, he had Garnett completely under control; in speed, he was a freak of a big man who could run the break and take the ball coast to coast himself. If you thought youthful leaping ability would let you overpower him, his 2.16-meter frame and terrifyingly quick elevation could swat Garnett's turnaround fadeaway straight out of the air.
For the first time on the court, Garnett felt the despair of being unable to find an opening. Against this superstar center in his prime, the raw talent he took such pride in could not find even a crack through which to exert itself.
For three full quarters, Garnett struggled in the Spurs' paint like a drowning man. Almost all his points came from alley-oops Sam Cassell threw him in transition. Once they settled into a half-court offense, even turning around became exceptionally difficult beneath the shadow of Robinson's defense.
Midway through the third quarter, Garnett forced a jump on a fast break with no chance of success. After being blocked, he lost his balance and slammed sideways onto the floor.
Gasps filled the arena. Robinson was the first to leave the offensive player, turn around, and haul Garnett up off the floor with his long, powerfully built hands.
The Admiral patted Garnett's backside and casually offered a quiet warning. "Easy, kid. Play like that, and you'll pay for it."
Garnett stared blankly at that face, filled with military authority yet carrying a gentle smile. For a moment, the mouth that could trash-talk everyone from point guard to center could not produce a single word.
He was used to Malone's dirty elbows, used to The Dream toying with him. He had thought that this paint, crowded with towering men, held nothing but bloody, life-or-death struggles.
He had never imagined that a superstar who pulverized him at both ends of the court would ask whether he was hurt when he fell.
At that moment, Garnett clenched his teeth and forcibly swallowed all the street-bred aggression in his belly.
The Boston Celtics still lost. At the third stop on their Texas tour, Boston fell without any suspense beneath the Spurs' iron-blooded defense.
In the locker room, Garnett wiped away his sweat with a towel, but his eyes remained fixed on the tactical board across from him.
"That Admiral is different from everyone I've faced before."
Robinson was a good man. A good man so clean that he was almost dazzling in this league.
Yet it was precisely this good man who, in a little over a year, would suffer the injury that would remove him from the best-center discussion for good. And Lin Qi was watching this disaster coldly from the sidelines like a vulture hidden in the shadows.
For the first time, the cruelty of this "omniscience and omnipotence" made Lin Qi waver a little over his transmigrator halo.
He wanted to build a vast dynasty for Boston.
To that end, he could dispassionately prune or even sever the team's superfluous branches. He could also coldly watch The Admiral fall into the abyss, then sit comfortably in the shadows and harvest the dividends born of that disaster.
Businessmen and dealmakers were not supposed to have feelings.
But when Lin Qi looked through the crack in the locker room door and saw The Admiral at center court, smiling as he shook hands with the arena cleaners and signed autographs, standing as straight as a statue of a god...
In the end, he still let out a soft sigh in his heart.
David, he said silently to that utterly unaware man, I hope I remembered wrong. I truly hope that back injury never comes.
But he knew that the torrent of history would not change course because of one person's compassion.