Red Dragon Spaceship Awakening: I Gain Alien Abilities on Mars-Chapter 196: The Weight of the Future

This wasn’t Earth where you were at peace with your life and had the luxury to take things slow and steady.

And while most might argue that ’Oh, there is financial pressure’ and all that... in our time.

Compare that to having to live in world of constant horror, where your motivation isn’t to get rich quickly, make family proud or all of that.

Your motivation is monsters and villans!

A tough brutal world where if you aren’t tough and brutal, you would... cease to exist.

And by the way, humans have gotten smarter.

Humans have been known to grow smarter as the years pass, knowing new stuffs, discovering things that were once impossible and inventing mind-blowing inventions.

Give a species like that centuries and they would be really smart.

Mars was a different place entirely. While it might be advanced in technology compared to Earth, it doesn’t have the casual luxury that Earth has.

The early colonists had learned that lesson the hard way. When you were living on a planet that actively wanted to kill you, when resources were scarce and every person needed to contribute to the collective effort of survival, you could not afford to let children spend a decade learning things they would not use. You could not afford to coddle them, to shelter them, to stretch their education across eighteen years of carefully paced development.

You needed them functional. You needed them capable. And you needed them fast.

So the system changed.

The old divisions—preschool, elementary, middle school, high school—were abolished entirely. In their place came a streamlined, accelerated curriculum designed to compress the essential knowledge and skills into the shortest possible timeframe. Children began their education as early as two or for people considered not too smart: Three.

Their lessons tailored to their individual cognitive development and augmented by neural enhancement technology that allowed them to absorb and retain information at rates that would have been impossible in previous generations.

Reading, mathematics, science, history, critical thinking, all of it was taught simultaneously, integrated into immersive learning environments that utilized virtual reality, AI tutors, and adaptive algorithms to optimize each child’s progress. There was no wasted time, no redundant lessons, no years spent rehashing concepts that had already been mastered.

And all the unnecessary stuffs that weren’t needed were simply cut off.

By the time a child was eight or nine, they had completed what would have once been considered a full primary and secondary education. They had the foundational knowledge equivalent to a high school graduate from Tatehan’s era, and they were ready to move on.

University came next, but even that had been transformed. Degrees were no longer measured in years but in competency. You studied what you needed to know for your chosen field, and the moment you could demonstrate mastery, you were done. Some fields were faster than others. Engineering, medicine, advanced theoretical physics, those might take until you were fourteen or fifteen. But trades, technical skills, applied sciences? Those could be completed by twelve, sometimes earlier.

There were exceptions, of course. Prodigies who finished their primary education at six and walked out of university with advanced degrees at ten. Geniuses whose minds had been so thoroughly optimized by genetic enhancements and neural augmentation that they operated on a level that would have seemed superhuman in any earlier age.

But even the average student, someone with no particular brilliance and no exceptional gifts, would complete their entire education and enter the workforce by their mid-teens.

And it was not just their minds that had changed. Their bodies had adapted as well.

Genetic modifications introduced during the early colonization efforts had fundamentally altered human development. Children grew faster, their bodies maturing at an accelerated rate that allowed them to reach full physical adulthood by their mid-teens. Puberty was shorter and more efficient, the hormonal chaos that had once defined adolescence smoothed out and streamlined by carefully engineered biology.

Though not too far from the norms.

By the time someone was fifteen or sixteen, they were not a teenager in the way Tatehan would have understood the term. They were an adult in every meaningful sense—physically mature, mentally developed, emotionally capable of navigating the complexities of life.

And it had to be that way. Because Mars did not wait for you to grow up. The Obscuron’s forces did not care that you were still figuring yourself out. The harsh environment, the constant threat of conflict, the unforgiving reality of life on a frontier world: all of it demanded that you be ready, or you would not survive.

So people adapted, they grew faster, they learned faster and they became capable faster.

And the result was a generation of young people who spoke, thought, and acted with a maturity that would have seemed impossible in any earlier era.

Lyra, long before eighteen, had already completed her education (fighter stuff (military look like) for the Red crest clan), fought in battles, and lost people she cared about, like her father.

She had experienced more in her short life than many people in Tatehan’s time would have experienced in twice as many years.

Riven, at seventeen, had trained in combat, navigated complex social and political dynamics, and carried herself with the poise and self-assurance of someone much older.

They were not anomalies. They were normal, in this world they were very normal.

This was just how people were now.

If you took the most intelligent person from Tatehan’s time: some brilliant scholar or scientist who had spent sixty years accumulating knowledge, honing their mind, mastering their field, and put them in a room with a fifteen-year-old from this era, the teenager would outthink them. Not because the older person was lacking, but because the baseline had shifted. The tools available, the enhancements, the accelerated development, it all added up to a level of cognitive ability that previous generations simply could not match.

It was a strange thought. Humbling, even.

But it was the goddamn reality!

The future had moved on. Humanity had evolved. And the world that Tatehan remembered, the one where eighteen-year-olds were still figuring out who they were and seventeen-year-olds were stumbling through high school, was gone.

This was Mars. This was the future. And it was nothing like the past.