Walking into the Speedway at 11:07 p.m., the first thing I notice is the smell of Vicks VapoRub, followed by a handful of people lying on the ground near the entrance. Already? The night is still young, I think to myself. I pass the Neon Garden, which is steadily thumping along with its groovy, tasty beats, and I know I’ll be returning here at least a few times as the hours tick on.

As I make the rounds, I notice two things that appear more intense than Friday, one being the weather. If Friday night was hot, then tonight is a scorching furnace. The second is the volume at the BassPod stage. I had joked earlier in the day that the stage, which was shut down on Saturday when a pod caught on fire, had been cursed. Walking past the demonic-sounding, eardrum-blasting stage on Sunday, I was almost certain that it was.

That noise only made running into a group of Christian ravers during Tiësto at the Kinetic Field—toting light-up Jesus signs, no less—even more surreal. As the Dutch stronghold lit up the stage, I saw the letters glowing in the distance. Are homeboys for real? I walked up to one of them and introduced myself, half-expecting them to be joking. “I feel like the way Jesus has been represented, even by Christians, is not correct,” he said. He wasn’t joking. “We’re coming here to represent Jesus as how he really is. Jesus is love, and a place like this is full of everybody that loves each other. So what better place to bring Jesus?”

It was an interesting experience, amplified in strangeness by the enormous sounds behind us. “Good evening EDC Las Vegas! My name is Tiësto and I’m here to party!” he said before dropping one of my favorite songs of the night, “Faded” by Alan Walker. Closing out the set, Tiësto brought out surprise guest John Legend to perform a snippet of his own single “All of Me” before the live debut of their just-released collab “Summer Nights.”

At 12:50 I made my way over to techno pioneer Richie Hawtin’s set at the Neon Garden, who spun deliciously dance-y beats filled with industrial crashes and a spacey, ambient pulse. Shortly after, I stopped in at the Circuit Grounds stage to catch Ferry Corsten under his trance alias Gouryella, playing the ethereal, shimmering single “Anahera.” The vibe was a stark contrast to stages like Wasteland and BassPod, as his official music video (the one with quotes about the universe) played behind him. “We see the finger print of the creator, the finger print of intelligence, the universe consist entirely of waves of motion which spring form stillness and return to stillness,” the screen read, as the video shuffled through scenes of sprawling fields, pyramids, cities and scenic landscapes.

The real highlight of the evening was witnessing Swedish techno god Adam Beyer at the Neon Garden around 2:30 a.m. Halfway through the set I found an old friend from college and we made our way through the crowd, two-stepping under the strobing lights. Glancing down at my phone, I was dumbfounded when I realized we’d been dancing for almost an hour. As it approached 4 a.m., I made my way toward the exit, sweaty and exhausted, my aching body longing for my bedsheets.