Although Mr. Wen didn’t personally know Jadeheart, he provided valuable insights.

For example, contrary to popular belief, Jadeheart wasn’t an elderly master in her fifties or seventies. She was, in fact, a young woman under thirty.

And she was famously reclusive. Apart from her debut appearance, she’d stayed out of the public eye. Mr. Wen recalled seeing her from a distance at her first exhibition.

“She was just a little girl then—small and skinny, but with strikingly long hair. You could tell she was brimming with talent,” Mr. Wen reminisced.

Hadwin couldn’t help but ask skeptically, “From that far away, without seeing her clearly, you could tell she had ‘talent’?...