How to properly blend two state machines

This is how I blended my state machines, however it feels hacked.

I had to use the cached locomotion as a entry state in my 2nd state machine because if left empty it gets blended with T-pose and a Conduit is not accepted as a entry node.

This does actually work, but blending the cache with the same cache sounds like blasphemy, there is also the issue that “relevant anim time” does not tick on locomotion cache.

So is there a better way to do this ?

You can blend two state machines using the blend node:

https://i.imgur.com/vpwtRkt.png

While this is true, my problem is that I still need something to use as a base “node” inside 2nd state machine.
A counduit would be perfect but it is not allowed as first node.