I was having a fun time until I got stuck on how to progress past 9 double compacted boxes. I left for a few days, and went back and figured out how to get the 16th upgrade.
It was pretty fun. I liked finding new strategies to make transcend time shorter. At the end, my strategy become "enter challenge 2, rebirth 10 times, transcend", which gave me the best time of 1.46 seconds.