Royal Mausoleum

Biodata

Location and Layout

• Mountain setting: The mausoleum occupies a grand, carefully maintained burial site with excellent feng shui. Dense trees shade the Royal Tomb Mountain Range, while its rarely visited grounds are silent and chilly 2 4.
• Summit tomb: A stairway leads to the repeatedly repaired tomb of the first Spirit King. Its inscription reads “Tomb of Ling Tian, the Primordial Spirit King Duke.” Unlike the shaded grounds below, the summit receives ample sunlight 4.
• Cultivation pavilion: Ling Yun uses a stone pavilion at the summit for secluded cultivation. The summit has the densest Spiritual Qi within the mausoleum 13 40.
• Wooden dwellings: Ling Yun initially lives in a small wooden hut at the foot of the mountain range. After obtaining the Heart of Heavenly Illusion, he builds a secluded cabin in the forest 2 8 39.
• View of the capital: From the heights, Ling Yun can see the Spirit King's Manor and Myriad Phenomena City beyond it 7.

Defenses and Surveillance

The mausoleum's formations serve both routine preservation and protection against powerful intruders. Its existing restrictions keep out even dust, making Ling Yun's supposed guarding duties largely unnecessary 4.

Three Layers of Ancestral Formations

Ling Yun's Additions

• Heavenly Eye Spell: Placed at the mausoleum's highest point to observe both the burial grounds and the Spirit King's Manor within its fifty-li range. It requires no ongoing expenditure of Ling Yun's spiritual power or divine thought, but supplies images without sound. He later replaces it after its effect expires 6 7 11 13.
• Heart of Heavenly Illusion: A sixth-tier supreme-grade illusion formation core that Ling Yun spreads over the entire mausoleum. It conceals the site and damage caused by his pill-refining accident, allowing him to remain hidden without first mastering a formation inheritance 39.

The Forbidden Heart

The mausoleum protects the Spirit King's branch's Forbidden Heart, an ancestral safeguard for the Five Branches of the Ling Clan. The Spirit King describes it as both their greatest protection and the clan's final strike before destruction 24.

• Restricted knowledge: Before the crisis, the mausoleum's secret is known only to successive Spirit Kings, the other three kings, and the emperor. Madam Wang learns of it when the Spirit King entrusts her with the manor's future 22 24.
• Reason for secrecy: The Spirit King fears that exposing the forbidden array would encourage enemies to infiltrate the grounds and discover the Forbidden Heart's true secret 24.
• Enemy objective: King Chen's long-running scheme against the manor aims to obtain the Forbidden Heart. The Spirit King later identifies him as an apparent Nether Envoy among the evil cultivators 20 41.

History

Ling Yun's Confinement

After Ling Yun's dantian is shattered, the manor's elders strip him of his heir status and assign him to guard the ancestral grounds. Madam Wang's men escort him there, but the appointment is effectively house arrest 1 2.

Ling Yun instead treats the isolation as an opportunity. Inside his hut, he uses the Primordial Immortal Pill to rebuild his dantian, awaken the Immortal Physique of Myriad Daos, and reach the peak of Essence Condensation. The mausoleum becomes his secret cultivation base and an important sign-in location 2 5.

A Tong visits with a Minor Rejuvenation Pill and promises to seek a cure for Ling Yun's supposedly ruined dantian. Other visits are less welcome: Madam Wang's attendant comes to obtain his fingerprint on the letter annulling his engagement 3 8.

Intrusions and King Chen's Attack

Two black-robed Core Formation cultivators secretly investigate the grounds. Using a blood-marked disc, they locate the first Spirit King's remains and then withdraw. Ling Yun lets them leave rather than alert whoever commands them 5.

During the battle between the manor's defenders and the Moon-Gazing Sect elders, the intruders return. Ling Yun recognizes them as his third uncle, Ling Guang, and a guest elder of the manor. Their conversation reveals that they also participated in the attack that crippled him. Ling Yun kills Ling Guang and cripples the elder, but green flames consume the elder before he can identify his master 19.

King Chen subsequently arrives to kill Ling Yun and claim the Forbidden Heart. Ling Yun uses talismans to delay him, then unleashes the Spirit Devouring Spell against his Primordial Spirit. King Chen dies, while Ling Yun survives with injuries 20 22 23.

Presumed Death and Sealing

The Spirit King senses the fighting at the ancestral grounds and urgently returns after ending the confrontation outside the manor. He finds King Chen's corpse, overturned trees, scorched earth, and Ling Yun's blood—but no Ling Yun. Finding no evidence that the ancestral formation was tampered with, he concludes that the mausoleum's secret remains undiscovered 22 23.

Ling Yun deliberately stays hidden and allows his family to believe he has died. The Spirit King subsequently orders the mausoleum sealed, forbidding anyone from approaching it 23 24.

After Ling Yun secretly treats his father's poison, he returns and conceals the grounds with the Heart of Heavenly Illusion. On the seventh day after awakening, the Spirit King activates the hidden defensive formations, separating the mausoleum's interior from the outside. Ling Yun remains within and spends the following year cultivating undisturbed 39 40 42.

Discovery Beneath the Formations

Formation patterns appearing near the first Spirit King's tomb prompt Ling Yun to study the Formation Emperor's inheritance. After identifying the first two defensive layers, he reaches toward the third with his spiritual sense and is transported into an underground passage 43 44 45.

The passage leads toward a magnificent stone palace containing murals. One depicts a radiant golden figure surrounded by a dragon, tiger, bird, turtle, and qilin. Ling Yun suspects that these scenes relate to the ancestors' origins and the unusually advanced third formation 45.

His exploration eventually brings him to a small world created by a dragon pearl, where Spiritual Qi is more than ten times denser than at the mausoleum's summit. There, he reaches the Early Primordial Spirit Realm and encounters a speaking flood dragon corpse, which reveals the Ling Clan's descent from a saint and explains the origins of the Forbidden Heart and Ling Kingdom 47 48.

Sign-In Rewards

Repeated daily sign-ins at the same location yield diminishing rewards. Ling Yun therefore saves opportunities for weekly, monthly, and yearly sign-ins while remaining at the mausoleum 6.