We study the scaling behavior of the (2+1)-flavor QCD crossover region towards the chiral limit
with smaller-than-physical light quark mass gauge ensembles, generated using the HISQ fermion
discretization. At zero chemical potential, we study the fluctuations of conserved charges and their
correlations with the chiral condensate, towards the chiral limit. We analyse the role of universal
and regular contributions to the above quantities. We find a preliminary estimate of the leading
curvature coefficient of the chiral phase transition line using scaling arguments.