The Super All-Rounder

The Super All-Rounder is an urban supernatural web novel by Yi V Long, serialized on Qidian Chinese Network from January 2011 and concluded that December, running to 661 chapters and about 3.15 million characters. The story begins with Yang Hongtao, a rich second-generation heir who has been framed. He is taken to the execution ground to be shot; before the sentence is carried out he silently recites the Six-Syllable Mantra he learned years earlier from an old lama, and his soul does not vanish in the sunlight but is sealed inside the bullet that pierces his skull, where on the execution ground it absorbs the lingering soul memories of over a hundred condemned prisoners. These memories are all-encompassing—gambling, hacking, ancient martial arts, appraisal, fighting, and the experience of every trade are crammed into his consciousness at once, transforming this once useless and incompetent young man into an "all-rounder" who knows and can do almost everything. After his rebirth he inherits the identity and fortune of a rich man's son, and also a beautiful wife, while gaining an ability close to "creating life": a mosquito, a cell phone, a piece of bread—he can grant each brief intelligence and life. Facing the secrets of a multinational conglomerate, he can make the other side's mainframe give birth to an electronic intelligence and hollow out its defenses from within; facing an assassin's pursuit, he does not fight head-on but "activates" the curved blade and pistol in the enemy's hands, making the weapons turn on their owner first. The novel is strung together from relatively independent plot units: turning the tables in a casino, rough-stone auctions and stone gambling, multinational business intrigue, hacking intrusions, battles with assassin organizations, and finally the resolution of a nuclear bomb crisis. The narrative focus always rests on the thrill of "using abilities" and "counter-killing," making it a representative long serialized work of early-2010s Qidian urban supernatural fiction.