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Aincrad (アインクラッド) is the 1st book in the Sword Art Online Light Novel series, published on April 10, 2009 in Japan.

Summary
A solo player named Kirito, who had the luck-of-the-draw to once play the beta version of the first VRMMORPG, «Sword Art Online» (SAO), was among the 10,000 players who were trapped inside of the game during the first day of its official service. The only way for them to escape is by clearing all the floors of Aincrad, the floating castle that is the setting for the game, and defeating the final boss. Death in-game means death in the real world, due to the NerveGear, a console that simulates the in-game character controls by redirecting brain signals. Two years after the start of the death game, out of the original ten thousand players at the start, less than seven thousand remain with twenty-five floors left to clear.

Prologue
A huge castle made of stone and steel floating in an endless sky. That was all this world was.

It took a various group of craftsmen one month to survey the place; the diameter of the base floor was about 10 kilometers, large enough to fit the entirety of Setagaya-ku within. Above, there were 100 floors stacking straight upwards; its sheer size was unbelievable. It was impossible to even guess how much data it consisted of.

Inside, there were a couple of large cities along with countless small scale towns and villages, forests and plains, and even lakes. Only one stairway linked each floor to another, and the stairways existed in dungeons where large numbers of monsters roamed; so discovering and getting through was no easy matter. However, once someone made a breakthrough and arrived at a city of the upper floor, the «Teleport Gates» there and of every cities in the lower floors would be connected making it possible for anyone to move freely through these levels.

With these conditions, the huge castle had been steadily conquered for two years. The current front line is the 74th Floor.

The name of the castle was «Aincrad», a world of battles with swords that continued floating and had engulfed approximately six thousand people. Otherwise known as... «Sword Art Online».

Canonicity Notes

 * (1b) In Rondo of a Fragile Blade, Kirito and Asuna continued their partnership after a small break when they met on Floor 2 again. Their party was decisively broken after the Floor 25 Boss Battle. (needs citation for wherever the latter information comes from too, but this is just an example draft anyways)