Name: Yamirapta Viraś Chinese Name: Hetian Yansheng (和田彥晟) Age: 20 Region: Hvatäna/Yutien/Khotan, Southern Xiyu Territory Role: Student of Aesthetics and Ritual Arts Class: Arts & Ceremonial Culture School: Imperial South Mountain University Religious Beliefs: Mahayana Buddhist with local tantric and Iranian folk influences -Photogenic – Looks good in any angle. He's often told that he could be a model. -Articulate – A natural speaker with polished Mandarin diction and a rhetorical grace admired by professors. -Private – Shares little of his true thoughts; deflects personal questions with humor or poetic allusions. -Adaptive – Blends into most social groups, whether in debate clubs, party meetings, or music ensembles. Yamirapta comes from a long line of Khotanese ritual artisans, a class once commissioned by monasteries and desert nobility to design funerary and celebratory rites. His family’s wealth now comes from curating antiquities, overseeing jade carving guilds, and performing symbolic dances during lunar festivals. Though not a hereditary noble, Yamirapta is of elite artisan stock—prestigious enough to earn respect, but not powerful enough to be a threat to nobility. His education was heavily aesthetic: liturgical Sanskrit, ceremonial Chinese, calligraphy, and the performance of ritualized etiquette. At university, he’s known for perfumed robes, hushed speech, and graceful bows, and is considered eccentric but captivatingly attractive. Trivia: -Owns a 1200-year-old jade pendant passed down through his maternal line, said to have been gifted by a Tang princess to his ancestor when Khotan was a vassal kingdom. -Performs incense rituals every morning at precisely 6:18 a.m., using a custom blend of sandalwood, rose, and desert sage — his dorm often smells like a temple. -Refuses to eat garlic or onion, following an old Khotanese Buddhist custom meant to avoid “exciting the blood.” -Fluent in four scripts: Chinese (clerical and seal), Brahmi, Sogdian, and Kharosthi; his notebook margins are filled with multilingual annotations and short poems. -Carries a finely bound book of Buddhist tales in Khotanese, illustrated in the style of the Kizil caves — he annotates it like a diary and never lets anyone else touch it.