The Mining Tycoon

The Mining Tycoon is a long urban supernatural novel by the web novelist Hei Mo, serialized on Qidian from 2015 and completed at roughly 700,000 Chinese characters. The protagonist, Tang Feng, is a graduate of China University of Geosciences in resource exploration engineering. After his father is jailed over a car accident and the family is left with hundreds of thousands of yuan in compensation debt, he gives up his guaranteed graduate school place and goes to the United States to work for a small private mineral survey company to pay off the debt. During an underground operation at an overseas mine, a gas explosion buries him and his crew deep underground; in desperation he accidentally fuses with a mysterious star core and survives. The core then grants him extraordinary mineral perception and prospecting abilities: he can pinpoint underground veins, identify mineral types and reserves, alter geological conditions to concentrate scattered precious-metal elements in the crust into industrially minable deposits, and even reactivate abandoned veins. More astonishing still, he can quietly "migrate" distant veins beneath land he has claimed. With this ability, Tang Feng rises from a poor hired hand to acquire land and hunt minerals in Australia and elsewhere and to take part in mining deals, rapidly accumulating wealth and becoming entangled in the power games of mine owners and capital. Set against the overseas mining industry, the novel blends technical detail about resource surveying with the satisfactions of urban supernatural fiction, its main line tracing the protagonist's counterattack from debt-driven survival to becoming a mining magnate in his own right.