The idea is that Qaf has charms which, instead of allowing ascension into the ranks of demonkind ala Oramus' Ascension's Lullaby, allow a student to work themselves into their own unique form of akuma/behemothood, using Revlid's Mutation system.
To clarify, the idea here is that while Qaf is very good at convincing his "students" that he's a Wise Old Master they should listen to even though he demands the moon & stars from them at best, usually ignores them utterly unless he needs something from them, and at worst does shit like "convincing" underperforming Pupils to meditate inside of burning kilns so they'll either find the inner wisdom and get their Enlightenment up to par or die quickly and stop wasting his time.
He "helps" his Pupils gain Enlightenment in much the same way that the Leader "helped" people by dumping shitloads of gamma-irradiated waste all over a small town: sure, if you're in the 20% who get superpowers from gamma bombardment, then you get to be a living embodiment of your inner self! The other 80%, of course, die horribly and are quickly forgotten.
Qaf should be SEELE, Orochimaru, Voldemort, Olivia Pierce (of NuDoom fame) and the bad guy who made the Homucluous in Full-Metal Alchemist.
Every villian who wanted to become more, to ascend beyond their limits and to reinvent themselves, gain mastery, achieve immortality or to change the world into one more to their liking etc. Often they will help their subordinates to achieve their own, often more limited, enlightenment or growth. But often they are used and discarded as suits their master.
Look to Orochimaru; the Sound Four were very competent and powerful, their training must have taken time and effort on Orochimaru's part - the material costs of housing and their equipment would have been high. They were elite Ninja, made stronger by the unholy power of the Cursed Seal. Such assets wouldn't be discarded casually. But as soon as the potential to further his own personal prowess arises, their lives were spent without hesitation on the Snake-Lord's part - like pebbles cast aside.
That's what you'll be looking for - a villian who enlightens and uplifts (but only so much) his followers so that they may aid his own enlightenment. But who also discards them without a thought when the time comes. He's not Szorenzy, who needs the attention, needs people to notice him. His students are their to learn and improve themselves so that they might better serve him, not to gratify his ego.
Heck, Thanos works as well - he wanted to change the world to his vision, and he had an army of loyal followers who he sacrificed to fuel his ambition. His relationship with Gamora and Nebula are another example; he disregarded Nebula and was cruel and callous to her, while Gamora was his favourite because of her skill and talent. He was considerate to her - he listened to her opnion and argued against it. We know that Nebula wouldn't have gotten the same consideration.
He loved her, as much as a person like him could, and he still sacrificed her for his own goals.
Qaf is the villian that says no sacrifice is too great, that the ends justify the means.
This is fairly close to what we're currently going for, actually. The main asterisk is that the Qaf we're writing is built for a super-exploitative, nomadic version of that. He doesn't build empires, he either subverts an existing organization and then steadily burns through its assets to further his quest (and then bails out and leaves the rest to burn when he's done with it), or he relies on his fucked up entourage of
sentai villains Enlightened Pupils to do the jobs he doesn't have time for while he accomplishes whatever goals he has in the region. If you want to be able to build a secret society, then you use another Yozi's Charms to do it, because Qaf sees temporal structures as either meaningless background noise or a resource to be expended.
Also, the other thing I'd emphasise is that you need to justify the Yozi's existence as a charmset in its own right. That means cloning effects that already exist in other Yozis as central elements is a big no-no. Trying to focus around "turning people into demons", for example, is a bad idea because now that exists in two different Yozis already which cover different thematic niches, and I don't think there's really much room for a third. If you can't claw out your own niche and interesting things that get people going "I want that!" then no, you can't support a Yozi.
The current idea is that it makes people into
behemoths, and it's heavily built on giving your "students" mutations if they can survive imitating the inhumanly brutal training regimens you practice. The Pupils who survive you long enough to achieve apotheosis get to be a weird one-off snowflakes (and the high mortality rate among Pupils, as well as their tendency to eventually snap and go off on their own if you're properly Qafian - i.e. neglectful and abusive - in managing them, keeps their numbers fairly manageable).
You don't use Madness to keep people in line, you convince them that you're the Buddha and by the time they realize that you're a goddamn monster, they've already become so warped and alienated from the mortal world by the "Enlightenment" they've gained from your teachings that they feel like there's nowhere else for them to go, or become as monomaniacal in their asceticism as you are. If Oramus is a Lovecraftian cult, then Qaf is like an RL cult, where it's all about isolating new members and making them feel like part of something bigger, cutting them off until even if they start having regrets, even if the scales fall from their eyes and they see behind the curtain, they'll keep doing what the Wizard tells them because it feels like they'll lose what little they have left if they make a scene.
One of our other major imperatives is to thoroughly disincentivize going into the wilderness to meditate on a mountaintop for decades; my personal angle for that is to have a Charm sequence that lets you "mine" spiritually significant locations for... something (XP that's exclusively earmarked for Qafian Charms, Sorcery spells, or boosting Enlightenment? Not good at crunch here) by meditating on their qualities, but you can only get so much benefit from a given location before there's nothing left for you to learn from it, so you get peak utility by being an itinerant vagrant who squats in powerful demesnes & manses for weeks on end (which means getting into conflict with the factions that currently occupy said demesne/manse)* before flitting off again.
A second Charm sequence turns your eyes into black mother-of-pearl orbs that you can pop out of your head and send floating away to find spiritually significant places/things for you to exploit, and eventually makes you grow additional eyes for the task.
@QafianSage has been planning a related branch of Charms that turn your eyes into knockoff Byakugan.
Also, an entry-level Charm that makes you substitute peoples' Enlightenment for their Appearance, so you inherently perceive mortals as hideously ugly (while gods, Sorcerers, and demon princes are incredibly beautiful) and no longer really grok the idea of physical appeal.
* It might be a good idea to have an upgrade that lets you do the same with powerful spirits, strange behemoths, and other things with weird esoteric Essence structures that you can plumb for inspiration. Of course, the best way to do it is likely to cripple or kill your subject, so an unscrupulous Qafian Infernal could deliberately build up his Pupils for future harvesting...
"You said my insight was a gift, Master! Why are you doing this?"
"It is indeed a gift you possess, my faithful student - and now you will give it to me, in payment for the time I've spent cultivating you."
