Tian Bufan gave him a sidelong glance and said mildly, "By 'school stratagem,' I meant 'a stratagem of calibration'... is that wrong?"
Wei Liang squawked, "I give up! Even classical Chinese doesn't abbreviate things as much as you do!"
"Liangzi, aren't you sleeping?" Lin Yi looked at him awkwardly. "Since you're awake, why don't you explain?"
"I... ah-abba abba... snore-snorrr~ snorrr..." Just like that, Wei Liang "fell asleep" sitting upright, like a master passing into nirvana, before tipping backward and falling heavily onto his bed.
"Ignore him," Tian Bufan said. "In the end, I'm the one explaining it to you anyway."
Tian Bufan asked, "Who gave us our cognition of our identities? And who gave Maozi his cognition of his identity as 'Mao Feiyang'?"
"Ours... didn't we all give ourselves those?" Lin Yi asked, puzzled.
Enter the school, report your identity, get confirmation from the Head Teacher, then collect your ID-wasn't that a perfectly smooth process?
What was wrong with that?
Tian Bufan said, "Exactly. But what if... the 'Mao Feiyang' in your cognition wasn't called 'Mao Feiyang,' but 'Bai Fangshuo'?"
"Huh? Maozi's called 'Bai Fangshuo'? What the hell?" Lin Yi failed to wrap his head around it at first.
Tian Bufan said mildly, "Not a single one of us has ever called Maozi by the name 'Mao Feiyang.' We can call him 'Maozi,' while his name can also be 'Bai Fangshuo.'"
"Huh?" Lin Yi was getting tangled up in it.
"'Dual name,' 'Cognition overlap,'" Tian Bufan said. "Once Maozi gets 'Bai Fangshuo's' Student ID, cognition overwrite will turn him into 'Bai Fangshuo.'"
"But... how would you pull that off?" Lin Yi was still confused. "Shouldn't Bai Fangshuo's Student ID be in 'Head Teacher 039's' hands?"
"No, wait! This was a setup from the very beginning?!" he exclaimed, finally catching