Fifteen year old Stefin-Dae runs away from home on the strength of an advertisement that any of today's readers would categorize as spam, and finds himself working for an asteroid mining company straight out of the classic Tennessee Ernie Ford song "Sixteen Tons:"
You load sixteen tons, and what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt.

A miner there could theoretically earn enough to buy passage home -- if he would only be man enough to quit wasting his wages on trivial luxuries like food, clothing and shelter. Sacrificing his hand in an escape attempt, Stefin eventually does manage to make it off the asteroid, only to find himself in one disaster after another, on the road to discovering that the cult of Bode-Satva thinks that he is their leader reborn -- and though he doesn't believe it himself, they might actually be right...

From the back cover:
Slabour -- Planet of riches, planet of death...

Stefin-Dae should have died on Slabour, like all good Diggers do. After a few years of grubbing in the earth for Creelium -- the most precious mineral known to man -- Stefin's lungs should have been so full of red dust that there was no room left for air. But Stefin got lucky, or maybe it was just his destiny. He escaped from Slabour, stumbled on the key to the universe, the secret of synchronicity...and became the most dangerous man in the inhabited galaxies!

(Duplicated from my Amazon review.)