  Highly charged ions (HCIs) offer many opportunities for next-generation clock
research due to the vast landscape of available electronic transitions in
different charge states. The development of XUV frequency combs has enabled the
search for clock transitions based on shorter wavelengths in HCIs. However,
without initial knowledge of the energy of the clock states, these narrow
transitions are difficult to be probed by lasers. In this Letter, we provide
experimental observation and theoretical calculation of a long-lived electronic
state in Nb-like Pb$^{41+}$ which could be used as a clock state. With the mass
spectrometer Pentatrap, the excitation energy of this metastable state is
directly determined as a mass difference at an energy of 31.2(8) eV,
corresponding to one of the most precise relative mass determinations to date
with a fractional uncertainty of $4\times10^{-12}$. This experimental result
agrees within 1 $\sigma$ with two partially different \textit{ab initio}
multi-configuration Dirac-Hartree-Fock calculations of 31.68(13) eV and
31.76(35) eV, respectively. With a calculated lifetime of 26.5(5.3) days, the
transition from this metastable state to the ground state bears a quality
factor of $1.1\times10^{23}$ and allows for the construction of a HCI clock
with a fractional frequency instability of $<10^{-19}/\sqrt{\tau}$.
